


We'll Hide Our Shadows in The Dark

by YouLookGoodInLeather



Category: A Court of Thorns and Roses Series - Sarah J. Maas
Genre: Aftercare, BDSM, Begging, Blood, Canon Compliant, Dubious Consent, Eventual Romance, Foursome, Foursome - M/M/M/M, Humiliation, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mental Instability, Non-Sexual Submission, Political Prisoner!Lucien AU, Power Play, Sexual Violence, Slow Burn, Wax Play, dom!Rhysand, implied PTSD, sub!Lucien
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-06
Updated: 2017-11-06
Packaged: 2018-11-28 13:21:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 34,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11418822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YouLookGoodInLeather/pseuds/YouLookGoodInLeather
Summary: After Lucien is exiled from the Autumn Court for bedding a Lesser Fae, it is Rhysand, not Tamlin, who takes him in; Not as a courtier, but as a political prisoner, to show just how much power he has against even the nobility. He is to destroy him in the spotlight of the public eye, to prove once and for all his omnipotence.What he doesn’t expect is to find Lucien so eager to be destroyed.





	1. apéritif

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **On semi-hiatus during November for Nanowrimo**

There is [one song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmVzeriU5m0), and one song only, that is the soundtrack for this work. 

* * *

 

 

Blood salts his split lip. Lucien winces, but does not pull away, as Rhys presses the pad of his thumb to that raw sore spot, circles, and _pushes_. Dying skin rips, widening the wound. Fresh blood oozes out, seeping between both their flesh.

Rhys gazes at what he has done, plying the gash with a detached kind of curiosity, before he takes his crimson-coated thumb and slicks it down across his prisoner’s tongue, smearing blood all the way to the back of his throat.

Like a dog, Lucien takes it. Licks his new ‘master’s thumb. Sucks away the salt, the heat, ignoring how it sickens him. His mind, which has not been silent since he watched her - still he cannot think her name without being overwhelmed with rage - finally quiets and focuses solely on his silent task. On obeying. On fighting back. On submitting. On becoming something _more_ than himself.

  
Sensing that Lucien is enjoying it too much, Rhys catches his jaw. He squeezes it hard, contorting his skin to burst his bust lip further. He forces his gaze up to meet his. “This isn’t about love, Red.” Lucien did not for a moment think it was. But then perhaps Rhys is not saying these words for him. He leans in closer, clenches him tighter, grinds the wound deeper. “It’s about _power_.”

 

 


	2. entrée

Many things have happened that Lucien does not wish to dwell on. Yet dwell he does.

He has watched his lover be executed on the stone tiles before him. Been beaten within an inch of his life by his own brothers, his own _servants_. Gone a week without food, with mere dribbles of water to keep him half-sane. Physically, he aches, but psychologically, he has been gouged from his chest cavity out. He does not know what or who he is anymore, only that he has become numb with internal hurt; He even misses the strike of flesh on flesh for how it distracted from the piercing force of his own thoughts. Fantasises about his brothers coming back to finish off the job. Coming back to save him from feeling at all.  

And perhaps that is why he is almost… _relieved_ when the only one who agrees to salvage him from his exile is the High Lord of The Night Court, a man notorious for his cruelty. Perhaps if he is as idiotic as Lucien has found high lords to be, he will think it ruthless to kill him; A notion Lucien finds bemusedly, but deeply, erotic.

When they meet, Lucien gagged and bound and kneeling, the High Lord enthroned in a court of nightmares, he truly believes this will finally all be over. Rhys is thick and shadow-swept and his gaze like the blackest ice. His body, lounging as a hunting cat suns itself upon the throne, is full of grace and two-second murders. The power that thrums through the entire court whispers on shadowy winds promises of death to any who dare question him.

Thus Lucien is elated when the gag is removed, and his new High Lord approaches. He is soliloquising to the gathered audience and the arrogance of him is almost palpable, but all Lucien tunes into is the end, for he is too busy estimating how hard those muscular arms can hit. “So let all the Courts witness how the Night can subdue and _break_ all of the elements. Even fire.”

Tensions between the solar courts and the elemental courts have been strained of late at best, on the brink of mutiny against the treaty in all honesty. Lucien remembers with dull amusement how he used to feverishly stay up till dawn and later studying such things, scavenging scraps of propaganda from all Courts to try and work out how he, a meaningless seventh son, could help. He’d just wanted to keep his people - to keep _her_ \- safe.

A hand grips his jaw, and Rhysand tilts his face up to the faelight shining overhead. “Azriel, don’t tell me you’ve brought me an already broken pony.”  

“He nearly burned three of his brothers to death, my lord. Succeeded with his father’s brother, the war hero General Mathis.”

“No pony then,” Rhysand muses, studying the bloodied, beaten profile before him with a smirk. “A veritable stallion.”

With perfect timing, Lucien spits in his face. “I’ll do the same to you before I let some bastard monstrosity _touch_ me.” Anger flashes across that beautiful dark face, and Lucien feels his cock twitch in his breaches because it is an expression that promises such destruction. “I will never bow before an abomination like you.”

The Illyrian, Azriel, makes a start to strike him, but Rhysand holds up his hands. He is smiling with more frost than all of the Winter Court. “I’m glad you said that,” he says, softly, yet the silent room hears it clearly. “It will make it all the more satisfying when you beg forgiveness before this very court. Before every court. My travelling pony show.”

“Fuck you.”

Rhysand slaps him. A taste of what is to come. It is all Lucien can do to stop from leaning _into_ it, to bite back on the plea for _more_ . “We’ll fix that vulgar tongue of yours.” He looks up to Azriel. “Have him brought to my chambers tonight.” Straightening, he turns his back on Lucien, leaving him aching and untouched and oh so desperate for that hand to sting him deeper, harder. “Anyone who shares this brat’s opinions will get the same treatment. And I’ll make sure _every_ Court knows that.”

***

Lucien is escorted by two dark skinned women shrouded by shadows into the chambers promised to him. Rhysand, still dressed in his black court finery, is reclining upon the bed, sipping wine and reading a book propped up on his thighs. As if he weren’t about to beat a man. As if it was just a normal Tuesday night.

“That will be all,” Rhys says without looking up, licking his fingertips to turn a page. The twins bow and vanish into the darkness just like that. Just what kind of a place Lucien has found himself in, he is not sure, but it promises silently the kind of relief he craves. His main protest is that the High Lord lounges on the bed whilst he kneels on the floor, not even coming close to striking him.

“Now, pony,” Rhys says without looking up. “I have no intention of hurting you, and I apologise for the demonstration that was necessary today. This can be easy for the both of us.” Finally, he meets his eyes, if only for a second. His are softer now, the frost thawed. Almost warm, sympathetic. It makes Lucien want to be sick.

“You will be housed, clothed, and fed. You will have the freedom to make use of my quarters at your leisure, and when I return to my home, you will accompany me. I shall employ you as one of my courtiers, eventually publicly. But for now, you shall travel with me as my newly submissive servant who will demonstrate to my enemies how I can break even the slayer of War Lords. Do you have any questions?”

Lucien should have known that the cold, the theatrical villainy, had been nothing but an act. It had all been too good to be true. And now here his demon sits, being all kinds of monstrous things, like _reasonable_ and _kind_. He feels like the butt of a joke played upon him by the universe.

He is silent for a long while. Rhysand does not watch him, but rather continues his studious reading. “No questions. But a condition.” _This_ makes the High Lord look up, raising his eyebrows in disbelief at the cheek of his new prisoner.

“Yes?” He prompts in a drawling tone. Lucien meets that gaze, holds it, doesn’t even swallow. He wants someone to understand, and what does he have to lose?

“I want you to do as you said. I want you to _break_ me.”

Silence again, but instead of waiting for his answer, Lucien is possessed by sudden passion, because he has been untouched for too long and the thoughts in his skull are starting to fester. “I will not preen over you, nor worship the ground you walk on, nor treat you as my master until you _make_ me.”

“I don’t- we don’t _need_ to do any of that. I’m saying we can just pretend that all happened. All that’s required is a little acting on your behalf.” Rhysand, mightest High Lord in all of history, is frowning like a confused school child.

“I don’t _want_ to act. I spent years acting, and look where it got me. I want-” He is choking on his own words, but the humiliation will be worth it if he gets what he needs. “I want you to break me, until every part of me is consumed and controlled by your touch. I want you to beat the feelings out of me.” He swallows, composing himself. “Else I’ll tell everyone how behind closed doors, you’re really just a pussy.”

Speechless, Rhysand swallows. His prominent cheeks are flushed, his fingers twitch. “You-”

“Break me, lordling,” Lucien snaps, all teeth and trying to obscure the fact that he is _begging_. “Or is all that power just for show?”

The book snaps shut. Rhysand slides from the bed, discards his reading, and crosses the room to tower over him, looking down at his pain-stricken features. Lips part to speak, but he swallows whatever half-formed sentence he’d prepared. Stretching out, he ghosts his fingertips across the cuts and bruises of Lucien’s skin. “Have you not had enough?” He asks, in little more than a whisper.

“I have had more than enough, of everyone. Especially myself.” Lucien would cry from how nauseating is own self-pity is, but he’s too tired. He’s so, so tired. “I just want a break. From thinking.”

Hesitating, Rhysand studies him. Subconsciously, his fingers find the sore spots on Lucien’s skin, noticing his wincing and then prodding further. He swallows, and now up close, Lucien is certain he is flushing. Darkening. Contemplating.

Fantasising.

“Stop holding back, Lordling,” Lucien purrs, going on the offensive, hunting. If he must bringing his demon to him, so be it. “You clearly spend so long holding back. Pretending. Why not try letting all that darkness out?”

Rhysand, of all things, laughs. “Cassian warned me you were charming. He met you once, at a bar of all places. Said you were surprisingly disarming for nobility. Which, to be fair, I think was a dig at me rather than you.” He takes a hold of the other’s jaw, and leans in, locking gazes. “You’ve won me over. I accept your condition.”

  
All at once, Lucien’s heart both soars and sinks. He has knocked upon the door to the abyss and wedged it open. “Well then,” he says, examining those dark eyes. “ _Break me_.”


	3. amuse-gueule

Though he is not sure he can survive it, Lucien consents to the week of preparation Rhysand requests. “Arrangements like this require… equipment. Equipment I rid myself of when I became High Lord.” Sighing upon catching Lucien’s quizzical look, he waves his hand in resignation. “I went from being the most powerful of my court to the most powerful in all of history. I couldn’t afford to make mistakes in- well, in this sort of thing without risking my partner's’ lives.”

Surprise colours Lucien’s throat, but he does not let it escape. He had not assumed that this was the sort of thing that other people did, let alone people who referred to one another as ‘partners’. He is asking to be undone and unmade, not wedded. Yet there is an order and foreshadowing of logic to Rhys’s words that appeals to him, a sense that though he may be hesitant, the High Lord understands what he is asking for, even if he does not fully comprehend it himself. He hasn’t known what he wants since she died. He is asking to be erased, but he no longer knows just what and who ‘he’ is. However, Rhys seems assuredly pragmatic about how to hold up his end of the bargain.

It is tantalising in a way that makes the following week unbearable.

Listless and without purpose, Lucien flits from the private gardens to the library and back again. He whittles away the long, impatient hours of the day staring at tomes of words without reading them. Idleness and time become the enemy, unwelcome artists in their own right as they paint for him in each room rehashed memories he is trying to bury, projecting apparitions of her likeness amongst the roses and bookshelves. What strange excitement he’d found starting up within him is soon crushed.

After what he allowed to pass, he is not permitted to experience pleasure. No more than he would wish his father, whose hand wielded the sword that beheaded her, happiness in any form.

The High Lord is absent all the while, at court or resourcing ‘equipment’, Lucien knows not. There is relief in not having to look upon that unyielding body, allowing a break from fantasising about all the different ways his body could dismantle his body. Yet simultaneously, he finds his mind wandering to remark absently on how prolific those sharp cheekbones of his are, and upon how he is the very picture of the tragic heroes _she_ so used to love reading about.

At first he finds these two mindsets contradictory. But after each night dreaming of being smothered by rough limbs and smirking lips, and awakening drenched in sweat and cum and shaking like fleeing prey, he starts to understand.

And suddenly, the term ‘partner’ makes too much sense.

He does not dream of Rhys that night, but of her, of the woman he condemned to death and who had been the only partner he’d ever wanted in life. Yet now she is gone, along with whomever he used to be.

When Rhysand returns, Lucien is ready.

 

***

 

They meet again in his chambers, the servants all dismissed for the night.

The High Lord is not reading this time. He stands before what used to be his four-poster bed, and what is now… Lucien does not know _what_ it is exactly. What was once wood is now a frame. It is stark, sleek, almost industrial, metal bars with holes drilled all along the sides, various clamps and hooks screwed into them. A length of black rope is slung over the bedside cabinet oh so casually. The faelight is on, but two black candles burn either side.

The last recent addition that Lucien notices is the trunk positioned behind the foot of the bed, worked from a finely polished dark wood and carved with patterns of knots from the old Myths. Drawn in on instinct, he steps towards it, reaches out. Something is inside and he swears he can _feel_ it calling to him. “Ah ah ah,” Rhys tsks as out of nowhere, winnowing before him and snatches his searching hand. Twists his wrist so he winces with pain, yielding instantly. “No peeking.”

Released, Lucien stands and stares feeling helpless, not because he is a fox cornered by the hunt but because he has to _wait_ five minutes more for it to start. Though he cannot put words to it, nor does he know in the way he knows the history of Hybern, there is something about this room, this setup, that resonates with him on a deeper-than-bone level. His palms itch with impatience.

“Is this what you wanted?” Rhysand asks, noting his fidgeting and mistaking it for anxiety. Lucien’s throat is currently occupied by vile pleas for them to _hurry the fuck up_ , so he merely nods. Just because he wants to be beaten senseless, doesn’t mean he’s going to beg like some pathetic infant. Even this, enduring the electric anticipation, felt better than anything that has come before. His appetite, dulled by the days of sulking, reignites.

He realises, for the first time in coherent words, that he wants Rhysand to _fuck_ him. His rage is insatiable and making love fell by the wayside when her head hit the floor. He wants this embodiment of power and royalty to invade and main him from the inside and out. He wants - _needs_ \- someone to punish him for what he has done.

Exhaling, Rhysand runs a hand back through his hair, examining his work. He checks a few knots, puts his weight on one of the ropes, and nods to himself. Finally, as if he knows the suspension is ravaging Lucien as much as any violence, he glances over at his ‘partner’. His face, so full of contradictions, of chilling fury and gentle compassion, has been wiped clean. All at once, he becomes a mask of composure, of predatory control. He is the master of this session, and Lucien is all too eager to consent to his instruction.

“Come,” Rhys says quietly, and if pulled by some invisible string, Lucien approaches. He is assessed with careful eyes, every inch studied, especially his half-healed bruising. “I will say this once and once only.” A shame, since Lucien is not sure he can listen when that body is so close, and that face is well within biting distance. “If you want to stop at any point, say ‘shadow’. Understood?”

One nod. The deal is done.

“Then let’s begin.”


	4. hors d'oeuvre

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> chapter specific tws: body-shaming, questionable aftercare, light bondage

The knot tightens too tight, digging into the veins of Lucien’s wrist with a sharp persistence. It’s nothing compared to what he endured back home, but it’s enough to wet the appetite, to promise more to come. 

Whilst he sits patiently on the bed, Rhysand kneels over him, securing his wrists and ankles to that metal monster of his. It all feels irksomely sterile, distant. This isn’t what Lucien wanted. He wants suffocation, not careful handling, and the High Lord’s expression is far too serene for an execution. 

Ensuring Rhys is distracted by double checking the knots, Lucien shifts and positions his knee against the other’s groin, massaging to find, to his surprise, the Lord is half hard already. Not so sterile after all; Especially when he releases a tight hiss in response to the sneak attack. 

He slaps him. Grunting at the unexpected start, Lucien glowers back at him, half in outrage, half in excitement. He’s not sure whether he’s furious or turned on, for it does not compute to him that he could possibly be both at once. All he knows is he did nothing to deserve that. 

“You don’t touch me,” Rhys warns him in a low, honeyed voice, gentle compared to the calloused fingers he is crushing Lucien’s neck with. “Understood?” Fuck that, Lucien didn’t come here to play demure. If Rhysand thinks he’ll get him to play submissive, he’ll have to work for it. For the second time, he spits at him. 

Tightening his grip upon Lucien’s windpipe, the High Lord growls and raises himself up so his cock is level with the other’s jaw. Seizing him by his flame red hair, Rhys yanks him forth to smother his face against the cool leather of his trousers, against the firming outline of his erection. Later, he would swear it was born solely of surprise, but Lucien’s body responds on automatic, and like a trained whore he licks across the leather, eyes glazed, jaw loose. 

“Better,” Rhysand purrs, his hips rolling softly against the attention. With the hand unoccupied by strands of crimson, he unzips himself and guides Lucien’s nose to tuck him out of his underwear. “Let’s see if you’re smart enough to work out what to do now.” 

It is almost as if he is thirsty for it. His throat aches preemptively, drying at the sight of evidence that the High Lord is as well endowed as the rumours say. The idea of  _ that _ in him, defiling him, ripping him, it leaves him whimpering before they’ve even started. 

His delay isn’t tolerated; Rhys shoves him in to force him to take his cock in his mouth, hard and hot against Lucien’s inexperienced tongue. He doesn’t know what to do. He’s never- not before this. This isn’t about sucking cock though; he just wants to be dismantled. 

“Suck it, fire boy,” Rhys says, coaxing him too gently, too softly. Though Lucien yearns for the beating, it helps, loosens his anxious throat as he takes the other deeper into his mouth and finds release in gagging. “There you go. Good boy.” That ruthless depravity he craves skirts the corners, closer and closer, as he is forced to keep him at the gagging point, and then further, to the point where he cannot breathe or see or think, only aware that he must serve the purpose of letting the other grind against his tongue and teeth. 

It feels good, to serve a purpose, and one purpose only. Everything else just falls away. Even her.

Too soon, Rhys slides his cock free, saliva linking him back to Lucien’s swollen lips as he stares up at him in a daze. “Oh dear,” he purrs, stroking his cheek, his hair. “I hope you’re not broken yet. We’ve got so much left to ruin you with.” However much Lucien wants to protest, snap back that he is as unerring as ever, all he can do is swallow the salt-metal taste of precum slicking the backs of his teeth.

“Such a pretty mouth,” Rhys muses, dragging his thumb across Lucien’s wet lower lip. “Shame about what comes out of it.”

“Fuck you,” Lucien rasps, mortified to find he sounds pleading even when he’s fighting back, his voice hoarse and quavering. 

“A perfect demonstration, Red.” Those eyes of blackest night study him the way prowling beasts size up their prey, and it is enough to have Lucien hard and pressing against his breeches. “But don’t you worry. It’s a flaw I can easily fix.” 

Leaning back to rummage in that new dark trunk of his, Rhys returns with what looks like a small belt, though a punctured sphere hangs in the middle. “Open,” he orders. When Lucien fails to comply, he squeezes his jaw to force it open for him, and inserts the sphere between his teeth, pushing it back unto his tongue to force it down. 

It’s not painful per say, but it’s hardly pleasant. Stretching his mouth, he tries to speak around it but finds all he can make are childish lisped syllables, the sounds more humiliating that any insult could be. 

His adjustment is closely monitored by the man before him, dark eyes assessing the fit and feel of the gag. “Much better,” he says, one finger trailing soft up Lucien’s bare chest, the other hand palming his thighs. It does not help the shame that he is fully clothed in opposition to Lucien’s near nakedness, his underwear his only remaining facade of a shield. 

Noting his gaze, the High Lord seems to divine from him his thoughts. “You think I have an unfair advantage?” He cooes mockingly, babyish and utterly cruel. “Oh darling, I was just trying to save you from embarrassment. Not all we nobility are quite so,” he looks him up and down and smirks, “ _ soft _ .”

Ears burning, Lucien fidgets under the too-perceptive gaze drinking in his every feature, suddenly regretting for the first time not being bone-headed and war obsessed like his brothers. He is well aware that he’s a little… well, softer around the edges, but he never thought Rhys would target him there. 

The worst part is how hard it makes him.

Grinning unkindly, Rhys unbuckles his leathers and shirks off his shirt, exposing a torso more muscle than man. His broad shoulders and carved abdominals leave Lucien all the more self-conscious of his pampered belly, the way the little seventh son has never had to do any heavy lifting in his life. 

“Maybe not so tough and unbreakable, hmm?” Rhys murmurs as he leans in close and cups the flesh that spills over the edge of Lucien’s underwear in one hand, palming it as if to highlight their comparison even further. A hundred insults and comebacks brewing in his head, Lucien finds all he can do is pant, his breathing suddenly heavy, laboured. Worse, a whimper escapes him as Rhys squeezes, snickering. 

That prying hand slips down, fingers hooking down his arse, and slides the protection of his underwear down his legs. His capable muscles coming in use, it is effortless for him to tug Lucien down to leave his ass exposed, pinning him on his back as the knots around his wrists render him unable to fight back. 

Leaning over between his legs, Rhys dips to kiss the sensitive spout below his navel, and continues with those chaste kisses all the way down to the heat of his thighs. One kiss against Lucien’s cock and he is gasping. “You really are desperate, aren’t you?” The gag choking his tongue banishes any response he might make, though he doubts he could formulate sentences anyway. It’s all he can do to stop himself from bucking up against that infuriating both, and even that fails after a gentle blow of cold air has him keening for it. 

Chuckling, Rhys licks up his hardened length before, without Lucien spotting it to anticipate, he slides two fingers into his arse. They are wet and cool, and after a moment Lucien realises they are lubricated. He swears against the gag, not out of pain - though it  _ hurts _ \- but out of anger. “I’m not fucking you dry on your first go, soft boy,” Rhys drawls with an eye roll that Lucien doesn’t see, but hears, for his eyes are screwed shut as those clever fingers invade him deeper. “There’s nothing fun in breaking you physically. At least, not before the rest of you.” 

Gasping, the gag making the sound an ugly, unmissable whistle so Rhysand can’t do anything  _ but _ know what a desperate shit he is, Lucien rocks back against those fingers as far as the ties on his limbs will allow. The ropes hold surprisingly fast and true, even when he throws his full strength against them. Then again, as Rhysand has so kindly pointed out, he’s hardly him with his muscles and training. 

Whilst he’s cursing his own life choices, Rhysand retreats his fingers and pushes his cock into him. Lucien’s never done it with a guy. And holy fucking hell.

It  _ hurts _ .

Actually screaming like the pathetic broken man Rhysand wants him to pretend to be, Lucien feels tears prick his eyes as he’s slammed into. The pain is raw and burning, and so fucking wanted. After his initial shock, he is driving his hips back just as hard, trying to urge the destruction deeper. It feels like oblivion. It feels like at least one moment of liberation. Especially when he’s screaming, his own sick sound drowning out any thoughts that might ruin the moment of getting what he deserves. 

Rhysand is swearing and hissing something in Illyrian, grappling onto him to keep up with the way he’s fucking back, harder than he is despite the restraints. It’s fast and brutal and all Lucien knows is he wants it to last forever. 

But it doesn’t. Rhys comes first, the hot explosion of liquid inside of him soaking his thighs, the sheets beneath him, and the sound of him grunting through it is enough to spill Lucien over the edge with him. Coming somehow hurts even more, the release of all that fury, his vision barely withstanding. 

As it fades, he has never felt so complete an exhaustion. 

Slumping back into the bed, he heaves his breath in, only half aware of Rhysand removing the gag in his mouth and unknotting the ropes. Though panting too, the High Lord looks much less dishevelled. “Tired, Red?” He teases with a shaking voice, though he’s grinning and his eyes speak volumes of how he’s more than ready to go again. On the other hand, Lucien feels like he could sleep for a year. “We’re going to have to work on your stamina if you expect to keep up.” 

“Fuck,” Lucien is interrupted by his own involuntary yawning, “you.” Rhys’ subsequent laughter was not the response he was going for. 

“That’s it for today,” he tells him, resting between his legs, one hand lazily stroking his thigh. “I’ve no interest in fucking you when you’re unconscious.” 

“Such a gentleman.” 

The is a hazy glow about Lucien’s vision and stomach that almost feels like being content. The constant loathing and dread still seeps around the corners, and he knows it won't last long, but he indulges in lingering in it. “Oh no.  _ No _ ,” Rhys says sharply as Lucien starts curling up. He hasn’t slept properly in weeks, so Rhysand can go fuck himself if he thinks he’s passing up this opportunity for decent rest. “You are not sleeping here.”

“Fuck you,” Lucien mumbles through another yawn, pretty much out of it already. Rhys starts ranting again, but he doesn’t process a word of it. Within the space of a minute, he’s asleep.


	5. coquilles

The following weeks pass as if he is drifting in a dream.

On the days Rhysand is absent, Lucien occupies himself with reading, keeping largely to his own chambers out of shyness for the redness marking his neck, the way he can’t quite smooth the limp from his walk. It feels a little bit like he is a kept mistress, a thought he’s not sure he entirely dislikes. There’s a kind of perverse splendour to how he’s gone from the do-gooder of a family filled with cloak and dagger games, to a captive lazing about and fucking his old enemy.

The main difference he’s noticed is how everything - and it really is everything - seems to make him horny. Even doing nothing at all but lounging about in bed turns him on. He doesn’t like to examine  _ why _ too closely, though the constant thoughts of what he is, what he has become, might answer it for him. He disgusts himself, this new whore persona he’s adopted, the reprehensible luxury and oblivion that surrounds him. And that disgust only makes him relish it all the more.

It stops him thinking about  _ her _ , and  _ them _ , and all the misery he’s left in his wake. He does not fight it.

When Rhysand deigns to visit, it is almost disappointing. He still refuses to go too hard, to do much beyond tie Lucien up and tease him, fuck him. It’s getting easier, looser, which seems to please the High Lord, but infuriates Lucien. Though he can’t deny that just playing the role of the slut is oddly satisfying, he craves the brutality of home, of his brothers. He wants Rhysand to  _ own _ him. Stop treating him like a person and start treating him like property. 

It’s these kinds of thoughts that make his skin crawl by just thinking them. If he dares critique them for a moment, he has to marvel in horror at his own desires. What has become of him, one once so hung up on justice and honesty and love? He who used to shrink back at the violence his kind displayed for those they treated as lesser, as objects to be used and broken. He used to defend them in any way possible. Now, he’s begging to become everything he once saw depravity in.

The horror remains, perhaps. But it too, just like the spoiling, the lazing, turns him on when he lets his imagination trail into the obscene and vile. “You’re not ready yet,” Rhysand tells him, when he whines for more. “When you are, I promise: we’ll go there.” He runs tender fingers up the sensitive skin of his jugular, smirking. “Trust me: you have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.”

Lucien does not believe that can be possible; he has wiled away so many hours and days fantasising. Planning. Touching himself in the privacy of his chambers to half-asleep imaginations of Rhysand unravelling him on those same bedsheets.  

“Tomorrow,” Rhys tells him one night, as he sits between his parted legs and lets him brush his hair - a weird ritual the other has taken up after every time they fuck - “we’re going to my actual home.”

“And what might that be?” Lucien asks absently, still floating in the post-coital haze and sweetness, savouring the way he can feel the forming bruises on his thighs and hips sing. “The Court of Ultimate Nightmares? Nightmares Deluxe? Evil Lair de la Court?” 

Snorting, Rhys gives his hair a yank. “No. Velaris. It’s a city you’re to tell no one outside about. It’s the only place in this court anyone can be themselves.”

“Ah yes,” Lucien drawls, “your good boy alter ego. How dull.” 

“You’ll meet my family.”

“Urgh. How horrifically romantic.”  

With a sharper tug on his hair this time, Rhys grabs his jaw to direct his gaze back at him. “It would be best if… you don’t disclose to them the entire nature of our relationship.”

“Is that what we’re calling this, a ‘relationship’?” He looks back at him, his tone biting, though his stomach turns more out of nerves than repulsion. He wanted destroying, not courting, and yet the way he’s seen the High Lord watch him does have something of an intoxicating quality about it. Even though he’s at the physical mercy of the other, it sometimes feels like he’s the one calling the shots. 

It makes his toes curl in all the worst possible ways. It’s the opposite of what he came seeking. So why does the idea of the High Lord of Night begging  _ him _ hold so much appeal? 

“That’s what I’ve told them it is. They know we see each other at night. I would appreciate it if we-”

“Pretend the tortured sex slave shtick really is a pretence?”

“Yes.”

“You High Lords and your webs of lies.” Lucien reaches back to touch the cut upon Rhys’s jaw from where he bit him moments ago. “Alright. I’ll play nice with your ‘good’, wholesome family.”

Rhys looks back at him for a moment, his frowning expression incomprehensible, before a crooked smirk grows wicked upon his face. “Once we reach Velaris,” he says, “then we can  _ really _ start our bargain. No prying ears to hear you, ah- vocalising.” 

Gut tightening, Lucien turns and slips up onto his lap, grinding close against his abdomen. “One more practice,” he murmurs, looking down at the predatory eyes gazing back at him. “Again.”

 

***

 

Initially, Lucien is certain he will despise this utopian Velaris. However, he is quick to change his mind when they winnow in on two men fucking atop a huge stone table.

Five minutes later, once everyone is tucked back into their breeches and the scarlet has faded from their cheeks. Introductions are in order. “Lucien. Meet Cassian and Azriel. They-” Rhysand doesn’t get to finish, for the larger of the two Illyrians already has his hands on Lucien’s shoulders and is grinning at him. 

“Hello, Princess. We’ve heard a lot about you.” 

“Probably everything but the truth,” Lucien quips back with wry honesty, well aware of how his appearance is being drunk in by the two bats. 

It is strange. Ever since he was a gangly teenager, he has never felt comfortable in his own skin, an itch he has never been able to name stitched beneath it. Now though, as he is appraised like meat at a market, he feels no fear, no shame colouring his ears. Perhaps it is from losing everything, or from the weeks of being fucked by the most desired bachelor in the kingdom, he can’t say. Yet, despite being softer and more provocatively dressed than ever, he finds a certain pleasure in how he is devoured by those gazes. 

“More than you’d think,” Cassian, the giant one, says. He is a man of huge proportions, yet his smiles are warm, if more sinful than the most outlandish censored smut banned from public libraries. “Rhysand hasn’t learned yet how not to kiss and tell.” 

“Yes. Kissing,” Lucien drawls with heavy sarcasm. “That’s exactly what we do.”

It is worth engaging with these strangers to see both the poorly concealed alarm on Rhysand’s face, and the delight worn by the giant. As for the third, a man wreathed in shadows and high cheekbones, his expression is unreadable, but his gaze never once strays from Lucien. “Sometimes, we even hold hands.”

“You’re free to go wherever you please, within the city grounds,” Rhys informs him later, when he is showing him his new quarters. It opens up to a balcony with a view of the stars and city below, a ridiculously lavish bathroom flanking to the east. “If you should want to buy anything, just tell them that-” The most powerful high lord of all time does not get to finish as Lucien drops to his knees and strips him of his lower garments in one unyielding motion. 

“It’s adorable that you think I care,” he says between kisses around the other’s cock, eliciting repressed hisses through gritted teeth. “But I believe you’ve got a deal to make good on, my lord.” 

“Still so needy after all this time,” Rhys muses, running a hand through his crimson hair before knotting his grip tight, tighter still. “Why is that, I wonder?” His tone is too personal, too prying. “What are you running from, Red?”

“I don’t remember  _ talking _ being a part of the deal,” Lucien responds coldly, dropping his affectionate kisses in favor of glaring up at the man before him. “Or any of this touchy feely bullshit you insist on.” He almost wishes he’d never looked up, to see the pitying gaze watching him. 

“I just think we should-”

“I am your prisoner, Rhysand. Not your project.” What arousal the previous encounter had swollen in him dies as memories of the words she screamed before they severed her neck from her torso rise in a cacophony of overlapping voices, voices of all the things they’d promised to one another back when they’d been naive and unafraid. 

“I don’t do that.” Rhys motions to kneel beside him, thus he is quick to stand, to avoid any semblance of tenderness as he feels himself breaking inside in the way he didn’t ask for, in the way he’s been avoiding all these weeks. The lord grabs him by the front of his shirt and shakes him. “I’m not fucking you like that if it makes all…  _ this  _ worse.”

“Then get out,” Lucien says, his voice full of venom. “I’ve no use for your pity.” 

Rhys goes to say something, his lips quivering with some clever reasoning he’s sure, but one look from Lucien silences him. Far more sensibly, he turns on his heel, and storms from the room. It is an unkind fate, leaving Lucien to an evening of panic attacks and disintegrating breathing as he tries to fight off a past he never asked for, but it is far more welcome than an evening of doing so in front of Rhysand.


	6. réclamer du sang

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter warnings for: body-shaming as means of humiliation, mild blood mention, crying.

Sometime just before dawn, the bedroom door slams open.

Lucien is halfway back from retrieving a glass of water when Rhysand appears in the doorway. Ribbons of night lace his wrists, decorating him the most unholy kind of present. His breathing is heavy.

It takes him a moment of their twin staring before he snaps back into action, stalking across the room. The glass smashes upon the stone as Lucien is pinned against the far wall, an elbow at his front, a hand crushing his abdomen. “If I do this,” his assailant growls, “then you have to agree to the rest. The talking. The ‘touchy-feely bullshit’. Else I’m out. I won’t do this without that.”

Heart hammering in his chest as if he is scared, as if he has not dreamed about this moment for weeks, Lucien trembles beneath him. The idea of ever revisiting what has passed sounds as agreeable as dismemberment by the Weaver, but then there is that tantalising promise of maybe he’ll lose his mind by the harsh cut of a hand before that can come to pass. Maybe he’ll be lucky, and the rough sex will kill him.

“Fine,” he snarls back, turning his face aside so he doesn’t have to see how far he’s pushed this man to a brink he never knew he had. It wasn’t meant to be like this. “I’ll play house with you, and we can pretend like _I’m_ the only damaged one. But I’m not doing it without-” A distraction. It catches in his throat, because he will not, can not, label it such a thing. For there is nothing to need distracting from.

There is nothing that keeps up him every night in a cold sweat telling him that he could have stopped it if only he weren’t such a coward.

“Deal.” Rhys is a ghost of the figure he played back in that throne room all those weeks ago, a monster, a masquerade, from the burning beneath his eyes to the way his lip raises ever so slightly to expose teeth. Eyes roving across the half-dressed man before him, he licks his lower lip. Once. Twice. “Strip.”

“I’m tired,” Lucien drawls, reclining against the wall with hooded eyes. “You do it.” It is the answer to all his asking when Rhysand strikes him hard across the cheekbone. A gasp escapes him, a whimper, both wordlessly pining for more. For all the protest, Rhys still tears his night things fresh off his body, ripping them with ease to leave Lucien’s body, pale from the months in dungeons and indoors, exposed and shivering.

Desperation kicking in, Lucien hitches himself up him, clamping his legs around his hips and using the new height to crush the snarling lips beneath him with his own. They’ve never really kissed before, but this is nothing like it was with her. It’s a hungering, a way to distract their aching bodies from how long it takes them to reach the bed, for Rhys to throw him down upon it.

He is different tonight. The tender care has vanished; as he flips Lucien onto his front there is no hesitation, no careful glances. A low thrumming, part purr part growl, resonates in the base of his throat as Lucien bucks back against him, grinding his ass against the swelling of his leathers. “You act so chaste,” he mocks with all the cruelty these weeks of waiting have brewed in him. “Yet you’re twice as eager for it as me, huh?”

“Shut up,” Rhysand orders, seizing him by the hair and forcing him face down into the pillow. “You don’t talk until I say you can.” Lucien begins to tell him to go fuck himself, but the moment noise leaves him something cold and flat cracks against his thigh.

Swearing loud enough for the entire house to hear, even against the muffling of the pillow, he tries to turn his head to see just what is being wielded against him, but the hand on the verge of scalping him suffocates him against the pillow deeper. “You know how to make me stop,” Rhys whispers, no kindness in his words, only condescension. “But you won’t, will you. So needy.” He strokes what Lucien thinks must be some kind of paddle feather-light up the inside of his thighs. “I’ve met centuries old virgins less wet for it than you.”

Panting against fabric, Lucien doesn’t talk, just whines and grinds harder against the clothed cock pressed against his ass to try and bring him in closer, to get him _in_ him. He’s wanted to savour this, to draw out his first undoing for as long as possible, yet now that it is happening, he has no patience for waiting. He has to bite down on the pillow just to stop himself from begging for a fuck.

“Listen to you,” Rhysand murmurs. “It’s like this is your first time. Did you let yourself get complacent, all those weeks of being gentle?” Blind against the pillow, Lucien feels rather than sees the firm torso that slides up against his back, the hand that brushes across his hips to fondle his erection. “You certainly look like it.” That hand finds his stomach once more, plying the generous give in a way that has Lucien on the verge of orgasm from that one touch alone. “I know Eowyn can cook, but _this_ is almost impressive.”

“I am going to fucking kill you,” he grunts against the bed sheet, deciding it is well worth the punishment. However, he receives none, save a cold laugh from the man coaxing hot, sticky liquid from his cock.

“Good luck with that, soft boy.”

Really pissed off and really fucking aroused, Lucien reverts to his tried and tested revenge methods of pushing back against the other’s erection. Its only effect is to get him crushed further into the pillow, to the point where it’s too hot and hard to breathe. The oxygen deprivation dizzies him, erasing all chance for thinking about dumb shit that Rhysand expects of him later. He doesn’t even try resisting.

Licking down the valley of his spine, the High Lord teases his cock till it’s near impossible to stop himself coming prematurely, and descends to nip at the lobe of his ear. “You’re so hot for humiliation, darling.” His breath is damp and humid against his skin, sending a chill down his chest, down his stomach. “Do you have any idea how sexy those noises you’re making are?”

Lucien wasn’t aware he was making noises, but the self-consciousness alerts him to the kind of animal keening that’s mewling in his throat. A chuckle brushes his jaw. “So desperate you didn’t even realise?” His theory that Rhysand’s a daemati is confirmed. All those times his thoughts have turned to filth in his presence, and he could have heard them clear as day. The realisation has him crying out against the sheets. “Did it really take you this long to work that one out? And I thought you were supposed to be the smart one.”

“You don’t,” Lucien heaves, hissing sharply as he is whacked again with the smooth leather of the paddle but persisting, “half love the sound of your own voice, you arrogant fuck.”

“Mmm,” the other purrs against the flesh of his neck, “yet you’re the one who goes to sleep imagining it.”

“You-”

“Your thoughts are loud enough for the whole court to hear, if only they knew how. You know how difficult it’s been, keeping my hands off of you in court, when all the while I could hear you thinking about me? Fucking me in your head whilst I had to listening to Keir drivel on about something. You certainly made the days more interesting.”

Each fantasy he had comes crashing back down on him as he realises just what Rhys has paid witness to inside the confines of his head, and perhaps he should feel outraged, but it does things deep in his stomach that speaks of the breed of degradation he’s searching for. “But we’re not here to discuss your fantasies,” Rhys murmurs, his lips caressing the slope of his shoulders. “I’m here to take mine.”

Returning his airways to drowning in pillows and shaking, involuntary gasps, Rhys scratches his free hand down his back. He must have some kind of beast form lurking beneath his skin, for those nails are no fae’s, sharp like razor metal, drawing blood as they scrape wanting across his spine.

Crying out in pain, Lucien feels himself coming as the sensation overwhelms him. “Oh no. You don’t get off that easy.” Behind him, Rhys pushes his own erection into him, no lube, no prep, no nothing. And Cauldron.

He wasn’t kidding about it hurting.

Lucien thinks he might pass out it sears so much, mixing with the endorphins of the orgasm, rushing fresh adrenaline through his system. He has just enough of a grasp on consciousness to rut back against the other, seeking more. More burning. More destruction. Anything to keep him here, in the cataclysm of feeling everything and thinking nothing.

That hand smothering him into the pillows runs back to twist in his hair and yanks him back. Forcing his back to arch, it whips his neck back, painful in itself, but then it keeps on pulling, to the point where Lucien is certain he’ll lose half his long, fire red hair his mother used to dote on so fondly. It feels like a thousand pinpricks erupting across his scalp, and it feels fucking amazing.

Seeping out of the glow of the orgasm, he is just as disorientated and heady on arousal as he realises he’s half hard again and Rhysand is fucking him to the point where his entire body has gone numb, save for the sensation of heat, fire. “Fuck,” the lord hisses from somewhere behind him, one hand in his hair, the over digging his nails into the soft swelling of his belly to keep their bodies flush against one another.

Lucien feels like he is somewhere else entirely, a foreign dimension where although his body is in intense pain and pleasure, he almost feels nothing. It is as close to the concept of transcendence as he has ever come. It is pure and utter bliss. He hopes it might last forever.

Rhysand comes amongst the pounding, keeping on for a few more jerks of his powerful hips before sliding out of him, the bedsheets and their thighs soaking. “Fuck. Fucking fuck.” Surprisingly, it is Lucien who remains upright, Rhysand bowing against his back, his forehead bent against his neck as if he were praying to him. “That.” He sucks in breath as Lucien, still erect and dazed, remains a perfect statue. “That was. Fuck.”

Noting his partner’s failure to orgasm again, Rhys is suddenly transformed. “Oh, poor Red,” he coos in a way that’s almost babying, though the sexual undertones make it anything but. “I’m sorry. Come here.” He gently guides him down and turns him onto his back. Still breathless, he takes Lucien’s cock into his mouth and sucks him off slowly, his tongue as talented as the rest of him.

It works to ground Lucien back in reality, the hot-close rub of his cock against the other’s throat, the way the monster of night is gone and before him is a man fixated on his pleasure. The illusion fades, and though the distant sense of tranquility remains, there’s a fragile quivering in his chest that he didn’t ask for.

Noticing it, judging by the way his eyes flicker up to scan his face in concern, Rhys leaves his duties to pull Lucien into his lap. Encircling his waist in his arms, he rests their foreheads together. “It’s okay. It’s okay, I’ve got you. You’re safe. You’re safe here.”

Quite inexplicably, Lucien starts sobbing.


	7. relevés

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> chapter warnings: aftercare, body discussions

Lucien wakes up drenched in sunshine and Rhysand’s arms, feeling like shit.

They’ve never before slept together, never in the same bed, let alone in one another’s arms. That first time, when exhaustion had claimed him the moment he was spent, Rhys had carried him through to his own room and tucked him in, but did not stay. How this came to be their first, it is difficult to remember.

Lucien recalls crying himself hoarse into broad shoulders, without the slightest idea why he was losing all the shit he’d so carefully guarded up until then. After that, it’s a blur of kisses atop his forehead and mumbled reassurances, falling on deaf ears. Sobbing was twice as tiresome as any vigorous sex could ever be.

Squinting against the sunlight, he is the first to awaken. Golden warmth coats his limbs through the crumpled sheets half covering them, yet all he feels is a clammy sickness. As he shifts to free himself from an embrace he refuses to relent to, a further horror strikes.

Cauldron. Why the fuck, after all of that, is he hard?

Beside him, Rhysand stirs at the slightest movement, cracking one eye to check for disturbance. Once he registers that his bedmate has awoken, he bolts up quick as as a heartbeat, all caring eyes and fretful worry.

Lucien is certain he’s going to vomit.

“Good morning. You can go back to sleep, if you like. We’ve nothing to attend to today. Court here’s a little different.” Loving hands strokes circles upon his abdomen, as if this is normality. As if he ever asked to wake up in someone else’s arms again.

“No,” he says, voice shaking, body shaking. Nausea washes over him wave by wave until the room is spinning worse than even last night. “No. I need to-” A hiss escapes his throat as just shifting his legs shoots arrows of pain through his spine, down his legs to his ankles.

“It’ll smart for a while. Sorry.” _Stop apologising_ , he growls in his thoughts, but the unease of his body renders him mute. “You-” Lucien doesn’t need to be a daemati, or even look at him, to know he’s spotted his morning wood, insufferable bastard that he is.

No doubt reading his thoughts as well, Rhysand drops the trivialities and hooks an arm around his waist. Sliding Lucien into the centre of the bed, resting him against soft sheets and pillows he once buried him in, he dips down to take up residence between his legs, hooking his knees over his shoulders. Those hands, so skilled at destruction, now rub gentle down his thighs, lulling him, and worst of all, succeeding.

“It’s okay, Luce. I’ve been expecting last night for a while.” Kissing the inside of his knee, the strange sensitive spot he never once thought about but now the lips are there it is all he can think about, Rhys watches him. “I don’t think it was a bad thing. You seemed like you needed it.”

“I-” Lucien looks anywhere but at him, anywhere but at that pity that doesn’t look so much like pity anymore but something far more insidious. “I’m not that. I’m not some crying- I still want-”

“I know,” Rhys murmurs, his proud nose mapping the outskirts of his inner leg. “And not from any mind reading magic. I get that this is,” he gives a heavy sigh, “complicated. Contradictory. A lot of bullshit.”

Finally allowing himself to look at the man so close to him, in ways he is overtly conscious of, Lucien mulls over that statement for a while. “You’ve done this before,” he says slowly, recalling what the other first said that first week they met. “Did you ever…?”

“Oh, definitely. I’ve cried like a baby more times than I can count. Though normally when on the receiving end. It-” There’s a lot of stopping and starting between the both of them, comic almost to the point of making Lucien laugh at how they can act so self-assured whilst here they are stammering away. “Well. It dredges up a lot of stuff, doesn’t it?”

Lucien would insist that for him it were the opposite, but there he’d been moments after orgasm, bawling his eyes out as if it were the day she’d died. “I never wanted it to,” he says instead, reaching over to brush his fingers through the tousled black hair of the other, stuck up all over the place from sleep and sex and the tears cried into it.

“I get that. That idea of a break from over-thinking.” He’d never realised Rhysand found that too, the cleft amongst the rock to hide in from the scathing in his head. It doesn’t seem to fit his genial composure. “But it - well, for me anyway - tends to make coming back to reality all the harder.”

Thinking on that, Lucien falls quiet, staring up at the ceiling. A mural of mountains and the stars glimmering above them curls about the circular surface, glinting faintly in the young morning light. “May I-?” Rhys asks softly, his tender touch sinking to caress the base of his thighs. No verbal answer, but Lucien nods. He’s not sure what to think or feel anymore. He’s not sure about anything, except that this erection is starting to hurt and this seems like a handy way to deal with it.

And it would be monstrously unfair to claim Rhysand is not good at it. Inexperienced Lucien has no clue what exactly he is doing, but there’s the sensation of teeth and tongue and a kind of building easing that has him arching up against the bed all over again. It’s too early for over-analysing, his whole body sore and feeling as heavy as lead. Instead he can’t help but remark how pleasurable this is, how he could get used to an eternity of this in the morning.

Not that his mind would ever let that happen.

When they’re done, Lucien dozes in a state of half-sleep, Rhysand lying on his front beside him. Those rough-soft hands of his are as active as ever, entwining constellations around his navel, nipples, collarbone. “For someone so vulgar about my body,” Lucien mumbles between napping, not bothering to open his eyes, “you certainly seem attached to it.”

“Naturally. I like your body. I like your body when it is with my body.” His voice takes on a theatrical air. “I like its hows. I like-”

“If you’re reciting poetry at me right now, I’m going back to my father and he will no doubt pardon me in light of my enduring such nonsense.”

Laughing proper, gut-deep laughter, Rhysand shifts closer, his stomach against his, his whole arm gliding across Lucien’s torso. “I am being serious. I find you body…” He clears his throat, and upon opening one eye Lucien finds that he is _blushing_. “It- If ignoring your too-loud thoughts was difficult enough at court, seeing you made me feel like the one enduring supposed torture. I like that you’re soft. I guess- I like the idea of you being well cared for.”

“So I’ve noticed,” Lucien mutters with marked bitterness, though if he wasn’t still steeping in the afterglow of an orgasm is is certain he’d be rock hard all over again. “About your conditions. Can we leave those parts until tomorrow? I don’t have the energy to fight you off today.”

“Perhaps I should take advantage,” Rhys suggests with a wicked grin, but as he speaks he inclines to kiss the other’s navel. “Yes. We can leave that for tomorrow. Today, will you let me show you the city?”

“Your precious Velaris. I suppose getting lost in the infamous Night Court would be too moronic a death, even for me. Fine. You can show off your magical utopia.”

It’s well over an hour later until they emerge from bed, and all of a sudden Lucien has become a dependant. Rhysand helps wash him, dress him, brushes out his hair and pins it up as well as any professional maid ever could, and leads him by the arm down to breakfast. Maybe once Lucien would have protested out of indignity, but in all honesty, now he relishes in the excessive spoiling. It seems a bizarre juxtaposition against his recurring urge to be beaten and broken, yet the two slot together without effort.

It is infinitely shameful to find he _likes_ being spoilt, and even more so to indulge without complaint within it. And indulge he well and truly does.

At breakfast he is pulled atop Rhysand’s lap, obeying without question the orders to retrieve this and that for him, serving as a makeshift table for his things when needed. He butters his toast for him, pours his juice, even kisses the stray crumbs from his lip.

It would be easy to pretend this devoted affection was the solution to the broiling in his chest, but he’s learned by now the transient nature of these passings. All too soon the urge to do away with kisses and fond attentiveness will emerge back from the shadows, and he’ll want the other again. And for the first time since arriving here, he finds that he is scared of it. Petrified that he might break down like that again.

For now, the compliant mistress act is kinder.

Over-full from Rhysand’s hickey-ladened feeding and petting him, he allows himself to be dragged out into the city as promised.

It is, as he dreaded, beautiful. A river that somehow sparkles every colour he could imagine runs through the far side, and there and in between everything speaks of peace, of contentedness. Quaint bakeries and cafes embellish the air with heady smells of baking and spices alien to him and Autumn, whilst everywhere fae of every species, lesser and high, intermingle. It is the cosmopolitan utopia his past self so often dreamed of.

Now he looks and sees a world where she belonged. Where she could have been safe and free of him and his father and all those years of hiding out in forests and caverns.

His tears deserted him last night, thus he simply takes his escort’s hand and rests his head upon his shoulder. It is a sadness too adult for him to know well, a bittersweet melancholy that has him smiling and thick of throat in an instant. He looks, and sees their runaway dreams were possible. He looks, and sees how acutely he has failed her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem Rhys is absolutely butchering is '[I Like My Body With It Is With Your](https://hellopoetry.com/poem/1590/i-like-my-body-when-it-is-with-your/)' by e e cummings


	8. digestif

The one thing Lucien has left in his repertoire is an endless supply of excuses.

It is a true art; At any given moment, he can pluck them from thin air and present them for inspection, though the real skill lies in how he knows Rhysand will not push him. Three days in a row he can feign a headache, the next week lethargy, and the High Lord does not say a word. It’s a funny thing, for Lucien is left feeling as if he is the spurner, the striker, instead of the one who once hit him.

And then of course, there is that.

They haven’t fucked in two weeks, not since the night when he could not help but flood the room with tears and ruin everything. Any and every time Rhysand pries just a little too deeply into his flesh, gets a little too seductive, he shoves him off and hisses ‘shadow’. Every night they sleep together, and the lord reveals a true penchant for bestowing morning blowjobs, but they never cross into that realm of teeth and flaying remarks. All because Lucien doesn’t want to.

That’s a lie. Want is all he feels these days, trailing him round the city he explores with listless boredom, occupying all thoughts free of her with thoughts of him. Of that body, those smiles, both dangerous and tender, the way the high lord strokes his hair at night when he thinks him sleeping. The way he knows they’ve permitted an infection that could well undo them both.

All of that is why he cannot let his guard down, not again. Beyond the walls he’s stationed around himself, there’s this sick little glimmer of a hope and a chance and a kind of shy tenderness that he isn’t allowed. For if he starts to wander there, he fears he cannot take her with him. To unfurl the tightly wrapped nightmares he keeps always close to his chest, he runs the risk of failing her for the last and ultimate time.

If he stops loving her, who will hold strong and remember her? Her family was executed too; Only he remains to dedicated sacred nights of fevered sweats to her memory.

Wouldn’t it be easy to chalk up all his nerves to her and her alone? To some noble desire to keep the flame of her love alive. Yet even when he dotes on her, Lucien knows the chords run deeper than just back to her. Life and its machinations have taught him over and over and over again that he is unworthy of all but desecration, so how is Rhysand possible? How is this perverted need of his to offer tenderness allowed within the logic of the universe Lucien has experienced for so long?

So instead of facing the impossible, he whiles away his days drifting along the riverbank, rubbing salt in the wound by drinking in the sights of how unfairly wonderful this Velaris is. He’s really seen it all now: Inter-species couples kissing under awnings, women entwined with women, men with men, children of every colour, shape, and size running screaming down the streets in games together. And…

And Rhysand made this.

He’s been waiting all these weeks for Rhysand to force it out of him, yet that night when they dine alone, he is the first to speak. “Before they killed her, they made me denounce her to her face. Said they’d spare her if I broke her heart completely. I spat on her and told her she was scum who had dirtied the entire palace just by setting foot inside.” Dipping his finger in his water, he runs the tip around the glass’s edge to produce a grating whine.

“Did she believe you?” Rhys asks from the opposite end of the long granite table, pausing, fork mid-way to his lips. He asks no questions of who or what or when. No doubt his spymaster has all those petty details written and filed away somewhere. She’s little more than a passing note amongst pages on a shelf now.

“No,” Lucien says, grazing his nail upon the table, not seeing it, but her, her face, his spit clinging to her hair. Silence.

“They’d have killed her anyway.”

“I know.” He might have been the most naive fool ever to grace the nobility, but even back then, he’d only clung to a bleak shred of hope, the dream that his brothers were not all they loved to seem. “But I wanted her to think it. To get to die hating me. Instead of-” She’d stared at him and only him even as they read her sentence, even as the sword had been readied above her neck. “Instead of pitying me. She deserved better than to die thinking about someone like- she deserved better than that.”

From the metres away, Rhysand studies him, fork still suspended midair. What Lucien feared, that ugly look of pity, is absent. Instead it’s something colder, something deeper, something that builds in his throat so he struggles to swallow before speaking. “You know my mother was Illyrian?”

“The whole kingdom knows.”

“When I lived with her in the camps,” Rhys says, busying himself with dicing up his food, “all the children would throw rocks at her whenever she left the house. And that was a kindness compared to how our kind treated her.”

Draining his glass dry, Lucien looks around for something stronger, anything to numb out how this makes his head sing. “Do you not have wine in the Night Court?” He asks with a voice as strained as any ropes around his wrist have ever been. “I’ve never seen-”

“I can have some brought through, if you like.” Rhys answers only begrudgingly. “But… I won’t touch you after you’ve drunk. You’re difficult enough to read sober.”

“You can quite literally read my mind,” Lucien points out, voice dry, although there’s a wet, hot feeling in his stomach at how the provision of solely water has always been on purpose. Cauldron knows he’d have found death in the bottom of a bottle by now if he’d had the chance.

Smirking without warmth, Rhys reclines back in his seat, watching him. “To say your thoughts are over the place would be a colossal understatement. The only time I can make much sense of what you’re thinking is when…”

“You’re not the only one.”

And there it is again. That brutal desire for both decimation and worship. To most of all slide with perfect fit between those firm arms. “I’m sorry about her,” the High Lord says gently. The sympathy should piss Lucien off, but he’s so spent on fury lately. Whatever bones inside him broke with rage have subdued to a dull ache, one he’s afraid to fill for fear of what he’ll do without it. “Your girl. And for what happened next.”

Lucien might have consented to discuss her, but ‘what happened next’ remains well off the table. His response is not of cutting words and flashing eyes this time, but of rising from his seat and crossing to the other. “Are you finished?” He asks, without bothering to glance at the half full plate in question. All he cares about are the dark eyes upon him and how they seem suitable for drowning in, now that his temper has estranged him. Eyes which precede words in saying _yes_.

He means to lure him back to beds and privacy, but those lips he’s refused to explore with his own hold new sway over him. They’re not just tools of crushing and humiliation, not after so much so soft has come from them. Soon, he finds heat from them too, attentiveness on his neck and jaw as he is pushed back against the uncleared table.

Two weeks of waiting was too much.

He wants him in him, and this time, he doesn’t need the violence. The betrayal of submitting is more than punishment enough for what he is about to do.

Drawing Rhysand into him, he puts those nights of preparatory fucks to use and is deft and quick to strip him of his leathers. Though he expected stern reason from the other, instead he finds he responds in kind, just as needing as he is if not with more burning. Those strong hands upon his skin dig for more, to meld their selves together as he sits up upon the table and-

Rhys swears. “I don’t have any-”

“I don’t care.”

“But you-”

“It won’t be like last time.” As if he’d throw himself into this if there were any chance it would be. Something’s different now, a thing he can’t name but knows isn’t born of mourning or regret. If it were, he wouldn’t be so petrified.

Slow, Rhys deliberates, but plying kisses coax him back to ridding Lucien of shirt and undergarments. “You’ve lost weight,” he observes unhelpfully as Lucien is trying to heed him into getting a move on.

“I haven’t much felt like eating,” Lucien dismisses him, snaking under how he holds him for inspection to bite light upon his neck.    

His attempts at brushing what seems a triviality to him aside are felled when Rhysand grabs his jaw and forces him to still, to endure without the escape of kisses. “Don’t do that again. I’ve got enough to worry about with you as it is.”

“You really have got a _thing_ , haven’t you?” Lucien teases, because maybe then he’ll stop reminding him how much damage he’s done _here_ as well and they can go back to fucking.

“You’re insufferable,” Rhys mutters, though it is with a grin and a resuming of close kissing, kissing that dips down and soon has Lucien shoving off the chinaware so he can sprawl out in its place and revel in the tongue upon his cock.

“Wait- Lucien.” It seems they’re going to be here all evening blathering. Rhys neglects the erection beneath him to straightening, leaning his weight against Lucien’s trembling legs propped up upon the stone. “Before- Before this. I need you to know: this isn’t just fucking for me. Not anymore.”

Looking down at him, caught between his legs, Lucien falls quiet. “I know,” he says once more. “I know it’s not.”

“Okay,” Rhys says, uncertainty bringing him to pause. Lucien sighs. Why are High Lords all so thick?

“Do you really think I’d be letting you do this if- don’t make me say it.”

“Say what?” The bastard smirks.

“That it’s not _just_ fucking for me either. There. Now, either hurry the fuck up and fuck me or you can fuck off.”

Snickering, Rhysand plants blooming hickies down the easy-bruising skin of his thighs and grins. “You’re kind of cute when you’re embarrassed.”

“Fuck off.”

“You are just asking to be gagged right now.”

“Too bad you don’t have it with you.”

“You are well aware,” the high lord drawls, “that it wouldn’t take two seconds for me to winnow and get it. But,” his fingers graze Lucien’s belly, that spot he seems so fond of, “I’d like to have this time without… all that.”

Reaching over, Lucien grabs him by the unbuttoned undershirt and pull them both together so their noses are nearly touching. “Rhysand. I am going to gag you in a minute if you don’t stop jabbering.” A more explicit threat rises in his throat only to die an early death by the hands of those chapped lips, that devious smirk.

“Still so desperate,” Rhys muses, chuckling when Lucien growls and pulls him onto the table with him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> quick psa: this is NOT the end of the uh... well, as Rhys put it, 'all that'.


	9. prélude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> chapter warnings: Lucien in eyeliner, possessiveness

For the first time since he fell in love with a woman his affections condemned to death, Lucien catches himself relaxing.

That alone should be enough to make him panic, but there is something about this place, about damn Velaris, that soothes without words. However, the true test of this farce of normalcy comes when Rhysand is called away to Hybern for a month.

“There is no way in this life or the next or any after that, that I am taking you with me,” Rhys says quite plainly when Lucien asks the obvious question. It’s been a week since they resumed keeping the rest of the house up at night, and though the fragile peace has lasted this long, a month is a long, long time to go unoccupied away from thoughts he’d prefer to do without.

“What about your ‘travelling pony show’ great schemes? I thought I was supposed to be refining my skill set as a Thespian?”

“Not with Hybern’s King. Never with him.”

The matter is closed, and three days later, Rhysand departs. Lucien is left alone in a house full of strangers.

That they are not better acquainted is entirely his own fault; what time he doesn’t spend in Rhys’s room he whittles away as far from the house as possible, down by streams or exploring the hodge podge shops and sights of the city below.

It has taken him this long to adjust to Rhysand. The idea of dealing with four more strangers is enough to turn his stomach. But, he agreed to try and at least show his face to the two women he has yet to encounter, and learn more than the names and cunning smiles of the Illyrians.

With great reluctance, he sets out to make good on his end of bargain. _Especially_ given what’s been promised in return.

 

***

 

Rhysand’s month away in Hybern is as close to torture as something done before courts can be, so he finds himself far from in the mood to return to deal with the fallout of leaving Lucien properly alone for the first time, and for so long at that. The distance and nights spent warmed solely by his own right hand and imagination might be killing him, but even once he is free to go, he has to take a minute to steel himself.

Swallowing, he winnows.

He’s not sure what he was expecting, but an empty bedroom was not one of them.

Figuring his… his… Figuring Lucien must have exiled himself to the city streets again, he lets his lack of patience show upon his face as he stalks off to the dining hall in search of his Inner Circle. He’d told them _specifically_ to keep an eye on the redhead, and given how all four of them are ranked amongst the most powerful individuals in the world, it didn’t seem like that big an ask.

He storms into the open-air hall to a sight far worse than he could possibly have imagined.

Lucien is seated at the middle of the table. To his right, Cassian, to his left, Azriel, and peering over the back of his chair stands The Morrigan. Technically speaking, they are only playing cards. But technically speaking never was a wise way to approach life at the Night Court.

High Lord Rhysand knows his courtiers well enough to know those looks upon their faces, to know not just what they mean but _exactly_ what they are thinking, daemati or not. Love them as he does, he does not think Lucien is ready for _that_.

“Oh. Look who’s decided to grace us with his presence,” Lucien drawls without looking up from where he’s setting down three cards. Mirroring one another on both his sides, both Illyrians look up at their master and even reliable, stoic Azriel has no shame in grinning at him like a cat fat on stolen milk. Mor doesn’t even look at him, busy leaning down to murmur strategies close and warm in Lucien’s ear.

The elected princess of this party alters his play, and only then does he look up at the man everyone else thinks rules him. It’s an irony Rhys is still adjusting to. “You can go back if you like. We’re quite at our leisure without you.”

“Are you now,” Rhys says, taking slow, measured steps towards the table, calculating just what his courtiers have in mind. His smile is careful, polite for the one he’s seeking, warning for the hunting cats prowling round the produce of his mistake.

Once again, he’s underestimated the redhead, and they look quite delighted to make him pay for it. “It seems I’ve been replaced.”

“On the verge of it,” Lucien retorts, his whole demeanour altered from all his past incarnations. Keeping up with all his multiplicities would be exhausting were it not so tantalisingly thrilling. There’s no fear this time, no anger, no shy seclusion, nor bashful affection. To call him anything but smug would be an injustice. Given his surroundings of doting suitors, it’s not worn unwisely. “Are you planning on staying?”

“I believe so. After all, I have a date to keep,” Rhys says, picking up on that purring tone, the way he's being undressed by a golden set of eyes. He stops opposite his appraiser, parted by the table, and reaches out a hand for him in offering. “If you’ll still do me the kindness of accepting.”

With deliberate languid movements, Lucien looks to his fellow players. Thank the cauldron the three of them just grin. “You’d better,” Cassian advices with eyes not half as wicked as his smile. “Our High Lord can be so… desperate to _hold hands_ at times.”

“Well, I suppose, if you insist.” Lucien smiles, his gaze flicking back up to the flushing man before him, all smirks and not a trace of anguish. “My lord.”

He takes the offered hand, and they winnow to the bedroom.

“You-” Lucien doesn’t get a chance to poke further fun at him, because Rhysand’s pinning him to the door and drowning in that mouth he’s missed so dearly. Just walking in on him looking like such self-appointed royalty had him half hard before his entire fucking court, but now it’s too much to waste on small talk.

Laughing through a gasp, Luce pushes him off and holds him at arm's length. “After abandoning me here amongst all these deviants? I think you can do a little better than that.” He stretches out against the door and gestures with a tilt of his head. “Knees, deserter. Else I’ll go take the others up on what they’ve been offering all week.”

Rhysand’s not an idiot; He knew he never ruled this messed up game they’ve been playing. He’s on his knees in seconds. Lucien never did have much shame about how vocal he was in the bedroom, but it’s way too obvious and way too hot the way he’s moaning as Rhysand rubs his mouth against his still dressed groin. It’s a noise that luxuriates in its own indecency, and all Rhys can do is marvel at how much has changed.

It’s not just in his temperament either, but outwardly too. The captive has stopped dressing himself in weeks-old clothes and has adopted the Night Court finery of male courtesans, no doubt a sign of Mor’s work, which lies detectable in the intricate braiding of his hair, and the kohl that wings his eyes.

“What do you think?” He asks breathily, catching sight of Rhys’ gawping. “Thought I ought to look the part if you’re to take me with you next time.” For a second, the constructed confidence falters as he grimaces, toying with the neckline that dips well below his clavicle. “It’s a bit- much. But your cousin insisted it was appropriate.”

“She would do,” Rhys chuckles.” She’s got a flair for theatricality and costume.”

“You don’t like it,” Lucien murmurs, interpreting how he can’t stop staring in all the wrong ways, crimson pooling up his cheeks and ears. “I can change it. It was stupid. I-” He cuts himself off with a gasp as Rhysand picks him up to scoop him up upon his hips, bringing their faces together.

“You look utterly ravishing, Red. To the point where I might be tempted to kill Cassian if he looks at you like that again, though I can hardly blame him.”

And he really does look stunning. Maybe he was never the generically handsome type, with his still healing scarred eye, the androgynous face and hair that render him somewhat disconcerting to look upon, but for Rhysand - and apparently the rest of his damn court - it _works_ . The colour has returned to his cheeks after those weeks of solitude outdoors, and the weird gauntness that didn’t suit him has vanished. He looks _well_.

And what more can Rhysand ask for?

“Funny,” Lucien mumbles back, quiet and red and touching two fingers light against the other’s jaw. “I didn’t peg you for the possessive type.”

“With you, I seem to be making a lot of exceptions. I wouldn’t normally fuck you before asking how you’ve been but,” their mutual erections should be answer enough, “I’m willing to break a couple rules right now.”  

Just how Lucien mentally interprets that, he has to give credit for creativity, not to mention how it has him wet against his clothing. “Not quite so disaffected by my absence as you claim to be, then,” He purrs in amusement, though carrying the other to the bed is tricky business when he’s projecting wild fantasies as loud as a drum at close quarters. It doesn’t help that Red’s thoughts only then shift to recalling his own nights alone, recollecting those spent buried into his pillow with his fingers shoved inside himself, just as frustrated by his lord's absence as by how lacking the substitute is.

“When do I get my reward for playing nice with your flunkies?” Lucien says, ignoring the mocking in favour of hauling Rhysand on top of him and kissing him fiercely.

“Whenever you want it.” He expects the demand for now, for the younger has been asking after it for so long, but instead he says,

“Later. Right now, I want to look at you.” He smirks as Rhysand strips his torso of the flimsy excuse for clothing he’s wearing. “You know: While you suck me off.”

“Oh, so you’ve started giving the orders now, have you?” Rhys hums as he traverses away from lips and ear lobes to the way he can make Lucien shiver with sharp licks across his nipple, how if he runs his tongue _just right_ down the middle of his belly to the lining of his groin he might even win a whimper.

“After you leave me to rot for a month, yes.”

“Really? You look pretty well taken care of to me.” There’s that old edge in his voice which is the jeering of something he is all too aroused by, but which mocking him for has them both hard and frustrated, even as he nuzzles against the swell of the other’s stomach. This time, instead of telling him to fuck off, Lucien just looks back at him with a smirk and a raised brow.  

“What can I say? Your companions have done a good job of taking me out on Velaris, and unlike Autumn, the Night Court can actually cook,” he says with a wry bemusement that speaks volumes of how he is well aware he is humouring Rhys’s inclinations, and that they both know the teasing is just a sign of how desperate the High Lord has been rendered.

Unable to stop himself, even though he was going to try and drag their reunion out as long as possible, he does as he is told and takes the swollen erection into his mouth. He’s done this countless times before, but normally just to satisfy another. This time, it is almost as if _he_ is the one getting sucked off, his groin hot and tight as he elicits low groaning from the other.

Bucking his hips back against him to force himself deeper, Lucien is quick to splay himself across the bed and stretch out, the resignation, the inward shrinking he’d shown back in the Court of Nightmares banished. With the lined eyes, the hitched up dressing, the rapidly unraveling hair, he really does look the part of the court whore. And here Rhysand is taking his orders.

He’s fast to conceal that he’s come inside his clothing without even touching himself, focusing on getting Lucien off even as his vision spins. It’s a kind of heat he hasn’t felt before, and he’s had plenty of experience, enough to coax Lucien to soon follow.

“Oh no,” Lucien pants, as Rhysand kneels back onto his heels and struggles to regain his breath, overwhelmed by all of, well, _this_. “You don’t get off that easy.” He doesn’t get a chance to steady himself, because soon Lucien has rolling him into the bedsheets and is ravaging his torso with that swollen, crimson mouth of his. And he can hardly claim to be complaining. There is only one thing left to say,

“Next week, we’re taking you to court. I think you’re more than ready to play the harlot.”

“And the broken prisoner,” Lucien murmurs back to him, that facade of brilliant ease quivering just for a moment, just long enough to make Rhysand wonder if this is actually a sign that he’s improving, or another layer of contradiction to work through. “Don’t forget that too.”


	10. incendie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> chapter warnings: in scene slut-shaming

They have enormous fun planning out just how best to fool everyone, so much so that Lucien doesn’t see it coming.

It starts maybe a day or two beforehand, just in the flickering of thoughts that would be counted as worrying if he wasn’t so quick to crush them and bury them down somewhere he doesn’t have to think about them. Rhys can feel it, judging by the way his brow furrows a little too often, and he keeps asking if he’s sure he’s ready. Good thing Lucien is now highly accomplished in distracting him.

He fools himself so well he doesn’t even notice the fire in the beginning.

For the first time since coming here, he’s spending the night in his own quarters alone, Rhys occupied in his study with preparations. A book rests open on his lap, which he insists he is reading, but it’s been there two hours and he’s still on the introductory chapter. He’s fine though. Just distracted is all.

It’s easy enough to keep telling himself that until he can feel the heat licking his skin and the book on his lap is in flames.

Shrieking out of surprise, he dashes off the bed to turn and find the whole thing’s ignited, the drapes disintegrating into drifting embers that threaten to spread around the room. Still, he can block out thoughts of why and maintain that everything is fine right up until the door bursts open. “I thought I could smell-” Rhys begins to explain himself, falling short when he sees he hasn’t just been hallucinating.

They stare at one another for a moment, before the new arrival has only to wave a hand and darkness engulfs the flame and extinguishes it with a literal snap of his fingers. And then he is on him, holding him, and the boughs break.

“Get off,” Lucien whispers, and when he is only held closer he repeats it again, shouting this time as he tries to claw the other off of him. Damn Illyrians and their damn muscles and their damn everything. “Get off me or I will-” It’s difficult to articulate when everything inside of you feels like it’s clashing together and also you’re crying but he’s not he swears he is not and Rhys and his comforting hushing can fuck right off because _he is fine_.

“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” Rhysand is murmuring over and over again as he keeps Lucien securely in his arms, no matter how violent he gets trying to throw them apart. That old anger he’d thought had died is everywhere, in every muscle and every thought as he says things he doesn’t really mean but in that moment he does and he just wishes this whole thing would be over.

Yet no matter what vile insults he spews, Rhys won’t stop clutching him or stroking his hair or telling him that he’s safe here. He might be of the Autumn Court, with their notorious tempers and supposedly endless stamina, but even Lucien cannot hold out forever against that. The transition happens without his permission and without his noticing, but one moment he’s screaming threats and the next he’s curled up in those arms and sobbing his eyes out.

“I’ve got you,” Rhys says warm and soft in his ear, as if he isn’t perfectly aware of that fact and hadn’t been fighting against those damn impossible arms for the past Cauldron knows how long.

“I’m not-” He tries to say, but even he doesn’t know how that sentence finishes. It’s dumb and stupid but amongst all of this insanity he doesn’t want to make the High Lord deal with even more than he’s had to. He doesn’t want to make him worry.

“I’m a High Lord. It’s my job to worry about everything.” There’s a smile in his voice that has Lucien melting and why can’t this just be black and white instead of whatever the hell he’s feeling right now? It was easier to grieve and nothing else because now he has to try and achieve some semblance of normalcy.

“Cauldron, Luce,” Rhysand mutters. The thickness of his voice has Lucien looking up and finding that his eyes are too shiny, his nose too red, and this is exactly what he was paranoid about. “I’m sorry. I- I didn’t mean to put _more_ pressure on you.”

“Stop it,” he hisses back through his teeth. “Stop prying into my mind. I can’t even fucking _think_ without you- I can’t police my thoughts as well just to keep you happy.”

All he wanted was to stop the other looking so wounded, but that was not the way to do it. Instead the High Lord is paling and frozen, before forcing the most heartbreaking kind of smile. “Sorry, I’m still working out how to control it. I- Sorry. There’s no excuse. I’m so sorry Luce, I-” He stops as Lucien falls to his knees before him and starts crying against his legs.

He didn’t want this. He could barely stand mourning her, hating himself, so did the cosmic joke being played on him really think it necessary to add what he really hopes isnt love into the equation? Already, he has hurt so many people. Why is it that no matter what he tries, the list just keeps growing?

“Luce,” Rhysand mumbles, and there’s no need to look to tell he’s crying. Against the way the other is clinging to him, he joins him on his knees and rests their foreheads together, kissing away the salt upon his cheeks. He dips to jaw, to lips. To sink deep against him until they’re sprawled across the floor, one atop the other, both feeling as if they are drowning. He pins two arms either side of him as if he’s in control but they can both see how bad he’s shaking.

Maybe reason says he should talk about whatever just happened, what is happening right now in his chest and gut and bones, but he can barely construct a sentence let alone do some self-reflection. All he knows is Rhysand is warm and the only place he feels like falling apart is safe.

He feels it coming back again. Not the fire-starting or the lavish affection, but that want, that need to exorcise the internal turmoil through rough touch, harsh words. “You sure that’s a good idea?” Rhysand says against his neck as he requests the bed through thought, his voice having fled far more sensibly than the rest of him. A grappling kiss and explicit thoughts are all it takes to get him swept up as requested.

It’s hard to focus in the bedsheets, his limbs and lips not enough to get all he wants at once. There’s a desperate rush and race and silent competition to disappear in one another, in the contours of Rhys’ thighs and the sweet spot below his ear. Whether wise or not, it suffocates all invasive thoughts for both of them.

“I want it now, Rhys,” Lucien pants, the images in his skull enough to fill in for where words fail him. This time there’s no questioning; Instead, a low growl rips through the High Lord's throat and he flips him onto his front, slicing his clothing right off him with those hard-sharp talons of his. He picks him up to balance him on his lap, and plunges him into darkness.

Though no cloth or tape binds his eyes, Lucien can’t see anything but black around him. Damp, ragged breath still coats his neck and hands rove around him, but he is witness to none. If he wanted, Rhys could kill him in one slit, and he’d never even see it coming.

“So easy to please,” Rhys sneers close against his ear, one hand trailing up his prominent erection. His sharp teeth scratch across the curves of shoulders as he rubs him where he is most sensitive, all whilst Lucien’s rendered blind and at his mercy. Though he couldn’t look to check, he can feel Rhys rock hard against the small of his back, and judging by his laboured breathing, the delay is entirely for his plaything’s benefit.

Lucien has only to yearn for something in passing, and the other delivers. “So much for ‘playing’ the slut, huh? You can’t get enough of it.” The breath is knocked right out of him as Rhysand pins him on his back, close, judging by the sensation of heat radiating off of that powerful body of his. “Too bad I’m not giving you anything until you beg for it.”

“Rhys-”

“Oh no, soft boy. It’s ‘my lord’ to you now.”

Swearing, too fucking hard for this delay and it only serving to make him all the harder, Lucien tries to remember how to think straight enough to articulate real words. “Rhys-” Scratches up his thighs serve as his reminder. “My lord, _please_. I need- I can’t-”

“Need what?” He hums, as if bored, though the act is compromised by how his voice is breaking.

“Please, I need you to- I need you to fuck me. Please.” He can’t- there’s just words coming out of his mouth now as he stares off into the darkness of all his vision is allowed, battling the urge to grind up against the other like the whore he’s so good at pretending to be.

“Look at you,” Rhys murmurs, sliding one hand down to ring a finger around the rim of his arse. “Can’t even speak without it. You filthy little,” he grunts the last word for he’s pushing into him, “slut.”

There’s no chance of stopping himself as Lucien cries out, mewling incoherently both curses and further begging, for the High Lord is too slow, too gentle, teasing him as he grinds ever so subtle against him. “Rhys-” Another reminder as he slams hard and sudden against him, tearing out another whimper. “My Lord, please. I need you to-”

“Fuck you? I’ve noticed. The whole of Velaris has probably noticed by now.”

It hardly helps him to be quieter as Rhysand picks up the pace and doesn't need to hold him any long to keep him trapped against the sheets, fingers gripping his legs, teeth biting against the giving flesh of his thighs to leave dark bruises for months to come.

Lucien makes a noise more decadent than any courts’ nobility and they come together, clinging onto flesh and fabric as if for dear life. His vision returns at once, the other no longer able to keep up the illusion as he doubles over and curses in Illyrian against his stomach. It’s light again, the faelight glimmering overhead, the singed drapery and velvets blankets in ruins around them.

All cried out, they both kneel and pant in a state of shock. Words somehow don’t seem appropriate, so it is all they can do to bring Lucien to nestle on his lap and, if nothing else, just hold one another until something about this thing they’re in makes sense.


	11. masque

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter warnings: in-scene coercion
> 
> To be rewritten when I'm not sick

“Don’t smile, only smirk. Only ever say thank you to our most glorious High Lord. You’re allowed two expressions: Pissed off, and amused. And  _ always _ look flirtatious. That really makes them think you’re evil, the close-minded bigots.” 

“And they really buy this stuff?” Lucien asks, looking up at Morrigan in the mirror. 

“Oh, they lap it up. Makes for excellent drama - they live on the stuff down there. Really, we’re doing them a service; We’re the only entertainment they ever get, they’re so insular.”

“You were born there, weren’t you?” He remembers as he sits and endures what is now the third hour of her dolling him up. To say it has reached the excessive stage wouldn’t get him anywhere no matter how true it is, because as Rhysand warned, she really is in her element. He gave up protesting an hour ago when she put  _ glitter _ on his eyelids. 

“Lucky me,” Mor mutters, biting down on her tongue as she works on twining his braids up into one collective coil atop his head. “If there’s anywhere to practice your routine though, it’s there. So long as you look the part and wear the badge, so to speak, they’ll be more than happy to think ill of you.” 

“What a strange thing to be hoping for.” 

Just as she finishes setting the pins in his hair, the door to his chambers cracks open. A very welcome face peers in. “Are you going to scream at me again?” The High Lord asks with a conspiratorial grin in Lucien’s direction. She sighs. 

“Maybe. You have to promise not to touch anything this time. And no funny business beforehand. I won’t have you smudging by hard work.”

“Aren’t we supposed to be highlighting the ‘funny business’?” He points out. 

“Not at the cost of high art, we’re not.” 

It is a miracle neither of them dissolve into hysterics as she finishes her fussing, before departing with a quick peck on both their cheeks to go and ready herself. “We’re agreed that  _ this _ is too much, yes?” Lucien gestures to the actual sparkles on his lashes.

“Oh, absolutely. It’s perfect. Exactly the kind of thing my evil twin would make you wear. Although I will say,  _ this  _ twin is finding it rather difficult not to touch the exhibition right now.”

Draping his arms over the other’s shoulders, Lucien tugs him in and risks alienating himself from Mor forever by kissing him. “Oh you’re in trouble now,” Rhys says through a snicker, before the boyish grin sobers and they must be serious. “You’re certain you still want to do this?” 

“Absolutely. It’ll be fun.”

“Last night-” 

“I’m not saying it will be easy,” Lucien admits against his better judgement, when the other can be so protective and oh so unaware of it. “But… last night. All of it. It’s going to be countless more people thinking I’ve- that I don’t care about her anymore. For them it’s going to be proof that she was just a perversity, just as much as it’s proof of your conquests. But they’ve been thinking that the whole time anyway. So if enforcing that helps you with all of this, everything you do in Velaris and elsewhere.” He grins, too warmly for the Court of Nightmares, too fond for his own comfort. “I want to help.” 

“I really hate Mor and her ‘high art’ right now,” Rhys breathes, looking at him as if he hadn’t just rambled on but had somehow said something of meaning, at least to him. “And we’re sticking with last night’s plan?” 

“Oh,” Lucien says with the kind of devious smirk that is  _ perfect _ for the nightmare court, “most certainly.”

 

***

 

“You’ve taken mercy on your little captive then?” Keir asks as he flanks Rhysand down the corridors, his courtiers following suit a short way behind them. 

“Why do you say that?” He responds, feigning ignorance whilst inside his stomach is doing flips because he knows what’s coming next and it’s all supposed to be for show but  _ Cauldron _ is it effort to stop himself from grinning.

“Well, you’ve left him behind, haven’t you. You haven’t killed him, I hope? I don’t want to deal with Beron again, not after what he did to his own people.” 

It’s a lot easier to resist smiling when things such as that are mentioned. “No,” Rhys says softly, trying not to think on that too hard for risk of exposing how much he dares to care. “No, he’s alive and well. Mostly.” Throwing open the doors to the throne room where he and the redhead first met, Rhys strides in and revels in the gasping. 

The other is already there, lounging upon the throne. 

“You dare,” Keir snarls, lunging forwards to attack, cut short by his lord holding up one hand. 

“Now, now, Keir. I think you’ll find he’s mine to punish.” Walking forth to the centre of the room, he looks up with the rest of those bustling through the door to get a good look at the man draped across his throne. “I thought I told you to wait here on your knees?”

“Did you?” The redhead drawls, inspecting his painted nails and yawning. “I wasn’t listening.”

“So much for breaking him,” someone mutters from the crowd, their sentiments echoed by the others. This is a careful line to toe, but if Rhysand is to get the most from this, it’s one they have to dance with. There’d be no prestige in breaking a man already broken. But what they are about to do… it is hard not to fear they are crossing a line. But then again, what else is he notorious for if not flagellating expectations, not to mention social decency?

“Why do I find that hard to believe?” He purrs, and all the while Lucien merely picks at his fingers and ignores their audience even as they gape at him. Not that anyone could blame them; Morrigan really has outdone herself this time. 

Scarlet silk the same shade as his hair wraps his right shoulder and drapes down his middle, leaving his sides on full display, his legs - which dangle off the chair’s arms - waxed and bare save for a pair of crimson slippers. His painted face and elaborate braids preempt the whispers of ‘whore’, and his softened frame from their last visit speaks of pampering and prestige. In appearance alone he is a scandal in and of himself. 

Whilst the extravagant presentation will no doubt ensure this spreads around the entire kingdom within a few days, it is hardly fair on poor Rhysand, who has to feign apathy and adjust his stance to hide his erection from their onlookers. “Off,” he barks, cold and terse as if last night and crying in one another’s arms never happened. 

“Make me,” Lucien shoots back, stretching out a leg to reveal  _ everything _ right up to the base of his thigh. The scandalised gasp the sight elicits is exactly what they are going for. 

A mere twist of the hand, and Rhys yanks him off of the chair, sending him sprawling across the stone. Though he’s pinned and pushed and pulled Lucien by arms countless times before, he’s never utilised the force of his magic upon him; It shakes him, beyond mere acting. Yet they both know he cannot go to comfort him.

Instead, he crosses the vast length of the hall to stand before him, dips, and rips him up to his knees by his hair, the responding whimper genuine. “Much better,” he jeers, voice low, but loud enough to be heard across the room. With a sweep of his cape - another touch added by Mor’s love for theatre - he sits upon his throne and gestures for his court to usher in and join him.

Lucien remains on his knees before him, head bowed, glassy gaze fixed upon his feet. Before Keir has a chance to catch up, his sneaks a glance up at the Lord before him and smirks, a kind of smirk that makes Rhysand very grateful for the cape he can fold across his lap. “Trouble breaking it in?” Keir’s nasal voice interrupts, quick to school Lucien back into his persona of demure submission. 

“Not at all,” the Lord responds, kicking one foot up to rest upon his captive’s shoulder, toying with the beautiful hairstyle to bring it half unravelled. “It’s just acting up because it thinks it’s got an audience.” 

Keir looks unconvinced, and the nobles gathered seem to share his sentiments, whispering and sniggering amongst themselves. “Perhaps,” Rhysand murmurs, tracing down the exposed sides of Lucien’s torso by the toe of his boot, “you’d like a demonstration?”

There is enough danger in his tone for Keir to know that a reply is not needed nor wanted; they are to receive one regardless of their permissions. The men and women gathered fall to a hush, sensing the shift in tone, one he has groomed them to know well. Lucien looks up at him. They check with just their eyes, and the way is set. Both know what’s coming. 

“Well then, pony.” Their courtiers draw closer, for his voice is soft but far from gentle. “Why don’t you show them some of the new tricks I’ve taught you?” 

“Fuck y-” Lucien starts to swear, but with a flick of Rhys’s finger he is dragged by a clump of hair up against the throne, his face throne against his crotch. 

“Now is that any way to speak to your superior?” 

Retching, Lucien is gagged by an invisible force throttling his neck, his choked grunts echoing around the spacious hall amongst the silence. Their bystanders and just that, not one looking to make a move nor to protest. Most will have witnessed far worse at the hands of his father. “Are you going to behave now?” Rhys says, leering at the other as he wraps one hand within his hair, twisting it round and round until the chords are in ribbons and his scalp is on tenterhooks. 

When he is released from the will of magic, his captive is flushed the colour of his hair and saliva wets the corners of his mouth, heaving in air with long, ragged breaths they all can hear. Those gathered will attest that he held all the fire of the Autumn court, but listening to him now, there’s an edge in his panting that speaks of breakage. That they don’t know it’s been there all along suits them just fine.

“Better,” he croons, clawing the other closer, a crass bite entering his tone. “Now don’t be shy. Show everyone what you’ve gotten so very good at.” Without assistance, Lucien employs his teeth to unclasp his lord’s trousers, nudging and nosing cloth aside to let tongue meet flesh. Behind them, their audience may not be able to see the details of the exchange, but even the most naive could recognise the sounds of lips coaxing the other to orgasm. 

Watching him, Rhys has to buckle down to stop the moans cramming against his lips, to suppress the shivers of his bones. It is impossible not to be acutely aware of all the eyes watching them. It is a cliche of his species, his gender, but he can’t help but nearly come at the thought that they are watching him  _ claiming him _ . They just have the wrong idea about who is doing the claiming.

Only Keir stands positioned to witness it, and witness it he does, staring, the colour of the Bone Carver’s grotesque creations. And whilst he may not be an entire court, Lucien is certain to put on a show. Heavy eyes, loose jawed, sloppy in his givings but oh so attentive, it is a performance more than anything, watching him even more erotic than the touch itself. Rhys has no trouble climaxing in spite of potential stage fright; His only difficulty is concealing just how much he’s enjoying it.

Knuckles white and taut, he grips their throne and exhales in a hiss, pushed to his limit of holding back a groan when Lucien swallows, licks again, again, cleaning up any and all stains before returning for further kisses across his groin. “That’s enough,” Rhysand growls, tugging him off because holy shit he’s not a good enough actor to deal with  _ that  _ and keep his cool.

One hand tucks him back into himself, whilst the other turns Lucien’s slack-jawed face towards the crowd. If there was any doubt in the truth of the act, his raw-rubbed lips, glassy eyes, and the glistening around his mouth is proof enough for all of them. Silence. Uneasy stiffening ripples through the onlookers as they scramble to find a reaction to being dragged through that. 

Someone laughs off kilter. “When do we get a go?”

He is on his knees in less than a second. A younger man, fair and handsome, he flinches as his kneecaps crack against the floor. Rhysand is before him in a flash of shadows. “None of you will touch him,” he breaths, towering over the insolent. He looks back to where Lucien kneels, watching him, their eyes aligned. 

“He belongs to me.”    

 


	12. savoureux

Lucien remains becomingly demure right up until they reach the bedroom door.

Keir parted from their way some time ago, looking more sullen than ever, no doubt a result of how matters in court had unfolded. Following their demonstration, every strategy, law, or ruling Rhysand put forth went often unquestioned. When issue arose, his challenger had only to be reminded of his proof of strength to be silenced. It seemed having tamed a murderer of war heroes truly did add to the legend of his being invincible.

It worked so well no comments were made - at least to his face - about the implications of his policies. He demanded all victims of assault and rape be sent his way for trialling? It was done. And rather than imagine it could be to provide them safeguarding, all assumed it was to punish them for their perceived trespasses, for afflicting ‘temptation’ upon others. After all, in their eyes he was now proven to be amongst the ranks of the assailants.

Lucien’s role in the deceit had been played almost too well, to the point at which Rhysand now finds himself feeling nauseous with guilt. He checks both directions of the corridor before cracking the door to his chambers, urging Lucien in first to avoid his being spotted. Following, he shuts the door and waits by it a while, straining his ears for signs they might be interrupted.

Only when he turns does he discover the exhilarated smirk upon the other’s lips, which wipes all thoughts of the court and Keir and so forth clean from his mind. Clean might be the wrong word - there is nothing clean about that smile.

Whatever relief Rhysand might feel to see that he _hasn’t_ traumatised the other is swiftly replaced by a kind of instinctive sinking of the stomach when he realises just how predatory the eyes upon him are. “That,” Lucien says, not once glancing away as he slides the pins and ties from his disheveled hair, letting it fall long and loose down his back, “was the most fun I've ever had. Period.”

“That’s your idea of fun?” Rhys asks, laughing out of disbelief.

“Did you see that arse’s face? In all my years of arguing with my father, I never once got him to look like that. Even when he found out about her he didn’t look half that tortured. Just let me know when I can blow you in front of _him_. Cauldron, why haven’t we been doing this from the beginning?”

“Oh I see,” Rhys purrs, posing against the door with one arm leaning against the wood, “now you’re just using me to get back at people?”

Shaking his hair out, the faelight above catching the lingering glitter upon his face, Lucien narrows his eyes and only smirks wider. “Oh, absolutely. Those courtly fucks don’t have a clue; Thinking I’m _owned_ by you.” Though he is the shorter of the two, he somehow manages to hold his chin and look down in a way that makes Rhysand feel slight as a child before him. “When so obviously the opposite is true.”

Maybe it’s the make-up or the adrenaline or the victory, he doesn’t know, but _something_ has altered in the other, and it leaves Rhysand feeling a lot more aroused than it perhaps should. It’s that same kind of stirring he felt upon witnessing Lucien sat upon a throne that in name at least is his. It’s the same kind of stirring he’s felt a hundred times before when dropping to his knees, returning tenfold before the redhead.

Lucien doesn’t even have to ask to bring him to his knees.

Snorting softly at his show of compliance, Lucien leaves him there, waiting on the ground whilst he runs his fingers through his tangled hair to sort it. “The way they all look at you… how the don’t say a word when you’re threatening death or worse. I didn’t understand why you did all this, really, up until now. There really is no room for the kind of thing in Velaris here, is there? They’d kill it before they even gave it a chance.”

“They don’t know any different,” Rhys answers from his kneeling, the excitement in his blood relegated to the back burner by the solemn subject. “The night court was raised by violence. Before any courts existed, the high fae here used to interbreed with themselves and Illyrians alike. When those that are now Spring traveled to discover us, copulating with 'lesser' fae… well. They began the traditions of violence, shall we say.”

Stilling, Lucien looks over at him. “I had no idea.”

“Most don’t. Spring’s put a lot of effort into making its history more palatable over the millennia.” Shrugging, Rhys slips down to sit between his ankles. “I hate this place, but I understand it. I was just lucky enough not to grow up here as my father wanted. Illyrians have been scarred just as badly by history, but the isolation affords them more chance to feel that openly.” He grins. “That and my mother was the single most rebellious person ever to exist.”

“The Illyrian woman with the unclipped wings,” Lucien mumbles, padding over to him to touch his fingers through his hair, stroking his jaw. “My mother used to tell me stories about her.”

“What?”

“About your mother. She’s quite infamous, you know. I’ve never met a woman who hasn’t heard of her.” He gives a wry grimace. “Not stories my father was too fond of, surprisingly. Clearly _they’re_ to blame for my deviancy.”   

Dipping, he pecks Rhysand chaste atop the forehead, who in turn has frozen. “I’m going to draw a bath. Then…” The smirk returns as he nuzzles close against his ear. “I believe it’s my turn to ‘own’ you?”

His revealing silks tumbling to the floor as he goes, Lucien swans off to the bathroom without looking back, humming to himself. Rhys is thankful for the moment of privacy. He doesn’t want the other seeing as his eyes start stinging. He paws at the stupid, traitorous tears, finding himself grinning.

He has never been more proud.

 

***

 

Checking himself in the mirror, Lucien tries valiantly to remove as much of the crap from his face as possible before bathing, but to little avail. The infuriating glitter seems only to have spread to now being on his damn forearms and shoulders as well, and his eyes still sit rimmed in black. At least his scalp no longer feels like it’s being constantly torn from his head - an early relief he really must thank Rhysand for.

If he can smooth over his moment of idiocy. How is he supposed to repair being so unthinking as to linger on the subject of the passed Illyrian? Always, Rhys has been sensitive enough never to push the subject of _her_ more than he did when bringing it up, but here he is proving what a dolt he is. It’s exactly the kind of naivete that got her killed in the first place.

No - he’s vowed not to dwell on that subject whilst they’re here. The Court of Nightmares lives up to its name well enough without his adding fuel to the fire. Instead, he directs his anger by hissing curses at the incorrigible glitter infestation, and lowers himself into the bath, dipping his head under to clear it of unwanted thoughts.

His father is going to hear of this. Sure, he didn’t suck a dick in _his_ face but it’ll be the worst thing he’s ever done in his eyes regardless. The pride he spoke of wasn’t false exactly, but there’s still an uneasy queerness in his stomach, a familiar prickling of the skin at the thought of how he’ll react. He’s already exiled him, so it’s not like he can do any worse. What’s more, Lucien knows that he hates the man, knows he hates everything he stands for, believes in, _does_ , and yet…

And yet here he is feeling like he’s seventeen again, being told he’s a ‘disappointment’ in loud voices and merciless hands. Other old concerns soon join them; Will his father take it out on his mother, as he so often did on purpose, right in front of him? Or will he take it out on his people, as he did that night, after her head hit the stone?

He’s so wrapped up in the spiral that still feels so much like home that he doesn’t notice the silhouette above the water at first. Resurfacing, once he’s sure he can force a convincing smile, he looks up at the High Lord beside his tub. “How can I be of service?”

“Budge. If there’s a moping underwater party, I want in.”

Laughing in spite of himself, Lucien watches with great interest as the other strips. “I wasn’t moping.”

“You know, water doesn’t stop thoughts being transmitted. If solid walls and hundreds of miles won’t do it, your piddly puddle doesn’t stand a chance.”

“Urgh,” Lucien tisks. “Pesky Daemati.”

Snickering, a fantastically fantastic naked Rhysand plops himself down in the tub behind him, before pulling him close into his lap. “I can teach you, you know,” he murmurs whilst trailing fingers over soft shoulders. “How to shield your thoughts. And not just from me, but at least from me as a minimum. I hate trespassing on your privacy without even meaning to, but then it’s even worse having no idea whether or not to do something about it.”

“Oh, the hardships of being a mighty, all-powerful High Lord,” Lucien drawls. “How difficult it must be for you to bear witness to we mortals’ petty thoughts.”

“That’s not what I meant and you know it,” Rhys says, flicking water at him to no avail but laughter.

“I’d like that,” Lucien concedes, settling back into the other’s arms once he’s ensured the return of the watery offense. “I guess if I have to have anyone privy to my thoughts, you’re not too bad an option. Thank The Mother my father has the capacity for mental magic of a rock.” Distracted by hands traversing down to his abdomen and beyond, he glances over his shoulder at the other. “Something on your mind, o’ all-powerful one?”

“No idea,” Rhysand mumbles between indulging in kissing the other's neck, shoulders, the vale between his shoulderblades, “what you could possibly be referring to.”

“After a day like today, you do _not_ get to play coy,” Lucien growls back, though his eyes close as the hands upon him get only more intimate. “I- fuck.” It shouldn’t be so easy to turn him on when they’ve been behaving so somber and discussing grave topics, yet here he is, fighting the urge to rub back against the other.

With sharp teeth and soft lips, Rhys leaves his neck a map of purple hues, dabbing up to kiss the shell of his earlobe. “I believe I owe to you one night of ownership, if my records are correct?”

“What a salacious document _that_ would be,” Lucien chuckles through shaky breaths. “But I find you are correct, they match my own.”

“Oh, past lovers? Now that’s something we haven’t discussed yet.”

Swivelling in the other’s lap, he outright scowls at him. “Are you trying to delay your payment? I charge interest, you know.”    

“Well in that case.” With one last kiss upon the lips, Rhysand slides free of him and the bath, before helping him out by the hand. Before he can even motion to grab a towel, Lucien finds himself scooped up and cupped flush against the other’s torso, face to face. “I am yours.”


	13. incendie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> chapter warnings: non-safeword begging

Rhysand doesn’t even make it to the bed.

The moment Lucien is rested atop the sheets, he catches the other by the chest with his foot and counterpoints his leaning in. “You had far better ideas an hour ago,” he purrs, eyes flicking down before returning to watch his lover’s face. “Knees, darling.”

He does not have to ask twice. With hands still hot from the bathwater, Rhysand parts his legs and slips between them where they dangle over the bed, grasping his thighs to edge him closer. There’s the same quietly-burning look behind his eyes he gets whenever he himself takes charge, yet seeing it this close up, with him upon the floor, has Lucien harder than ever.

He’d always assumed it was born of the thrill of power. Down on his knees, the High Lord’s muscle-bound body still speaks of power in every inch, the disquieting thrum of magic that could kill a room in half a breath still ebs through the air, and yet a word from Lucien can outplay it all. And now he understands the full extent of the appeal behind controlling someone so completely. To have a body and mind of that much power wrapped around his little finger is intoxicating enough, regardless of what they do in the bedroom.

“Well,” he says, voice not as steady as he’d like as he tries to acclimatise to all these new sensations. “If you’re just going to sit there I can go ask that blondie if-” Suddenly, Rhys is off the floor. He’s on his lips and straddling his lap and gripping him hard enough to drown in him. There’s a fervour in those kisses that reminds Lucien that this isn’t all just for play, not anymore, not even the bringing of High Lords to their knees.

Breaking to recover breath, Rhys looks down at him, chest heaving, with eyes intense enough to render him silent. “Forgive me, if I’m not ready to share you quite yet,” he murmurs, whetting his appetite for more with his lips down the other’s neck, chest, till he’s sinking back onto the floor and licking up legs to groins.

“Oh?” Lucien hums, lifting one leg to muse his toes through his lord’s dark hair. “You think I’m yours to share or keep? You seem to be forgetting the records of your own ledger, dearest.”

“And yet I fear it would kill me, if anyone, let alone one of _them,_ mistreated you.” Rhysand leans into the touch with perfect obedience, hands snaking up to secure the other’s waist. “And thus do you out of a toy.”

“Well, if it’s in the interests of safeguarding my property, I suppose I can humour you,” Lucien drawls, smirking as his ankle is caught and claimed by kisses that mark a trail to his inner thigh. He’d held a thousand ideas for things to say, on a night like this, to avenge the kind of filth Rhysand had degraded him with, and yet as Rhys takes his cock in his mouth he cannot find them, or any words at all. Enraptured, all he can do is watch as the other drags that silver tongue of his up his cock, meeting his gaze all the while.

Watching him, Lucien remembers all the things he’s dreamed up and dreamed about and dreamed of, countless idle hours willing sacrificed to indulgence. It’s not as if this scenario has never before occurred to him. Now, he can do _whatever he likes_.

“Do we have-”

“Darling, do you really think me so unprepared?” Rhys smirks back preemptively, nuzzling into him with the bridge of his prominent nose when speech dares demand use of his tongue.

“Thought you might have ‘forgotten’ them to protect yourself.”

“Oh, I’m going to need protecting, am I?” Though he is lavishing himself upon the other, he has a look of confident defiance born of his superior experience in the bedroom; The challenge only makes him all the more appealing. “That’ll be the day.”

“Up,” Lucien orders, itching to start, even blowjobs too slow for his appetite. Cauldron, even Rhys is too slow, lingering to circle the head of his cock with a graze of his teeth, though in his case, the delay is almost certainly on purpose. Lucien has no choice but to grab him and _pull_ the bastard up onto the bed, rolling them over so he has him pinned betwixt his legs. His lordship looks up at him with narrow eyes, a quirked brow, ugly smirk. Mocking.

“Impatient, are we? I thought you were supposed to be the one in control tonight?”

Lucien would laugh at his impertinence were he not so fucking horny right now, instead giving the other’s rock hard cock a squeeze to point out how he is far from alone in his arousal. Rhysand groans. “You are so fucking hot when you get bitchy.”

“Now, is that any way to refer to your superiors?”

“Apologies. You are so fucking hot when you get bitchy, my lord.”

“Oh, I could get used to that title,” Lucien chuckles, sweeping the points of his nails across the broad chest beneath him to leave raised white lines, like the cloud trails traced by Illyrians in flight. The analogy just makes him remember how hot Rhysand looks when his wings are unfurled; teasing time is over.

Keeping one knee firmly pressed into the gut of his captive to ensure he stays put, Lucien leans over and finds, as promised, the mahogany trunk at the foot of the bed. He’s… he’s never before been permitted to look in there. There’s nothing strictly magical about the item, and yet as he dusts his fingers over the engravings, his skin feels like magic’s crawling on the surface. It almost seems too good a mystery to ruin.

“Chickening out?” A certain bastard drawls from behind him. With a sharp jut of his knee into that beautiful six-pack, Lucien clicks open the silver locks and lifts.

“...Why it took you a whole week to prepare is starting to make sense.” And he’d thought he had a lot of plans for the pair of them.

“I’ve added a couple of things since learning what makes you tick. But you know me, the best High Lord in all of history; I like to be prepared.”

Admittedly, he is a little on the intimidated side as he takes in the sight of all the toys and props and… and things he could not identify for the life of him. It’s a crate full of promise and fun, but for his first time getting to return the favour to his darling High Lord, little of it suits his interests. Glancing about, he remembers more primitive ideas, and returns to Rhysand with the chest locked back up and smiling. Between his hands, he uncoils a smooth black rope.

“Ooh, how _scary_ ,” Rhys jeers, though he is watching his fingers twisting that rope with interest so obvious that even he blushes. “Although, a particular favourite.”

“Rhys, shut up,” Lucien mutters with a crooked grin, having acquired a feel for the rope and an idea of how to use the stupid metal framing on the bed. “If you think _this_ is the worst of it, perhaps I should send _you_ back to Blondie. Maybe he’ll be more gentle.”

Heeding the advice, Rhysand keeps his trap shut as Lucien tethers his ankles. As he comes up to his wrists, however, his voice lowers, away from the riling edge of teasing to something warmer. “Wrong knot, Lu. Yeah, now through there. Yep, that’s the one, got it. Look at you, all trained up.”

“Are you making fun of me?” Lucien chides sternly, stretching over to secure the left hand wrist. After the chest and all that Rhysand has done so deftly to him, it’s hard to avoid feeling the pressure. He might look the courtly whore, but his experience is still limited to a dead girl and a master.

He’s never played the aggressor before. To do so… There is something new about it, something different from drinking all the stimulation in, something that he didn’t anticipate. Every second isn’t just a choice not to stop, but a choice to _do_. He can’t claim just to be giving in any longer.

“Luce,” Rhys murmurs beside his ear, breath intimate against his jaw. “You know if anything, I’m proud of you right?” Tugging tight the knot, Lucien settles back onto his heels and looks back at him, studying that face for a long while, not sure what he’s looking for. Whatever it is that he’s hoping will send him running, he doesn’t find it. There’s something far more perilous in those eyes, but of a nature that’s echoed in his own chest.

Kissing him, he lingers in the tender peace of his lips for just a moment, allowing himself that much. “You know that isn’t going to get you out of this, right?” He whispers, blooming into a grin as wicked as any Cassian could brew. He strokes his fingers back through that soft black hair of his High Lord, before lowering to his jaw. Right next to his ears, so he can hear that one noise crisp and clear, he clicks his fingers.

The fae light vanishes. In its place, the black candles atop the twin bedside tables catch aflame. “Romantic,” Rhys notes, lips parting to shit talk further, but Lucien stills them with one finger, a gentle press.

“Darling, in the Autumn Court, fire is always a little bit more than that.” As the amusement on the lord’s gorgeous face turns to confusion, slips to dawning realisation, his lover plucks free a candle from its stand. “Relax. You won’t be getting the same treatment as my uncle.”

“Wow. I confess, I underestimated you, Red,” Rhysand says, voice cocky, but he’s bracing himself against his ropes and leaning back into the bed away from the heat of the flame suspended above him. “I didn’t think you had it-” One drop of wax has him dissolving into hisses. “Fucking Cauldron _fuck_ . Those are _not_ safety candles.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, _soft boy_. Would you like me to stop?” Lucien is only teasing in tone, but he finds the one fear that plagues him most as he plays master is that he will overstep. “You know you only have to say shadow if I win, right?”

Gazing back at him, Rhys has this weird half smile on his lips and too much softness round the eyes, given how he’s just had boiling hot wax poured on him. “Well look at you. Safe word and everything. Aren’t-” Another drop, another hiss. Two more. Others, till Lucien has left a trail as black as night pitter patter down the centre of his lover’s chest, raising the hairs of the skin around it. Blood floods to the surface, pooling his chest brighter than any scratches, though no skin’s been torn.

Lucien might not be a daemati, but he _thinks_ that maybe it might hurt. Or at least, that’s what he deduces from how Rhysand is swearing every colour of the rainbow. His muscles, built and pummelled by training, leave the bed filled with creaks as he strains against the rope. “Oh, is that you asking for more? I can’t quite hear you,” Lucien says amongst the cursing, sliding one hand across the other’s thigh to cup his cock. “What about-?” He swears the bedpost is about to snap when two drops of black wax drip across the shaft of Rhysand’s cock.

The High Lord, who just two minutes ago was poking fun at him with an easy smile, is now retreating against the bedsheets, head locked back, eyes unseeing when they’re open, screwed tight when they’re shut. He is flat out whining. “Oh Cauldron, fuck no. Please don’t, please not again,” he begs, though he’s grinning. Even though Lucien knows these things, that newness of the situation has him saying anyway,

“You know those aren’t the words.”

“Fucking fuck, Luce. Please, don’t-” That answer enough, Lucien squeezes his cock and turns the candle upside down.

Rivets of scalding wax draw swirls across his chest. Lucien pays close attention to finding what really gets him screaming: The nipples earn the sound of _something_ in or on the bed snapping, and best of all is the bastard’s navel, which is all too satisfying after the close attention he’s paid his. Gasping, Rhys soon slips from sentences to single words, to little more than grunts and incoherent syllables. Each drop triggers a spasm from his whole body, every time he catches sight of the flame, a jolt.

Lucien has never come close to this much power over someone. It’s intoxicating in all kinds of ways. All that he could do, with a whole night and a trunk full of treasures, all that it must mean for Rhysand to trust him enough to do this to him. All that he can make Rhysand feel with this much freedom. And whilst everything out of the lord’s mouth is slathered in pain, his cock tells the other side of this story, pressing against Lucien’s abdomen where he sits nestled in his lap.

The candle reduced to a third of its height, Lucien has mercy and sets it back in its cradle. Below him, Rhysand is a gibbering mess, panting and delirious. “Hey,” Lucien mumbles, dipping to kiss the rare bare patches of his chest, which is now a mess of night black spots that have nothing to do with his powers. “Hey, you still with me, Rhys?”

Whining, a high-pitched, bestial sound, Rhys wriggles and shifts to coax him up to his lips. His face is flushed beyond measure, tears drying on his cheeks, eyes glazed, yet he’s grinning like he’s post-coital already, his enormous smile like that of a drunk or a child. Nuzzling against Lucien, he’s the antithesis of the man who would just as happily fuck him bloody, yet somehow just as appealing. Lucien wonders if this is how he looks after his devastations.

Whilst kissing the mumbling man beneath him, he undoes the wrist ties, then kisses his way down navels and thighs and ankles to free his legs. A hand in his hair pulls him back, eager for lips and necks and then all of a sudden a hand is upon him, guiding his cock towards the other’s ass. Before he even has to ask, the other gestures to the draws, where an impressive collection of lubricants await his appraisal.

Two slicked fingers slide cautious into Rhys while Lucien monitors him closely, able to remember how much just this hurt back before he was ‘in shape’, so to speak. However, given what just happened, Rhysand seems positively serene, grinding against his fingers to urge them deeper, to urge in more, to urge him to hurry up and do away with hands all together.

Sliding himself into the other, Lucien is all thumbs and left feet, not so sure how to position himself. He hasn’t done this since her, and this is more different from that than Night is from Autumn. Lazy hands of his lover are fast to guide him though, pulling him atop of him and holding him close as they guide him to a slow rocking. It’s far from rough and heavy, yet Rhysand is soon groaning beneath him, head tipped back as he bites down on his bottom lip, a smile splitting through.

It’s that smile that loosens the knot of apprehension in Lucien’s stomach, and soon he’s no longer trying his best not to hurt Rhysand any further, and instead usurps his only goal to be to make Rhysand make as many of those gorgeous moans as possible. They’re so close and warm, he’s never felt so entwined with someone despite how just minutes ago he was delighting in a kind of torture. Or perhaps it is because of that. He’s still not sure, but slowly, he’s giving up worrying.

With a gasp that is actually kind of cute, even for Rhysand, he comes all over their chests and stomachs, the hot, sticky liquid slicking between them. It triggers some kind of contraction of his insides that brings Luicen right over the edge after him, whimpering at the unusual sensation. Exhausted, drenched, and spent, they look up at each other and find themselves without words. All Lucien can do is kiss him.


	14. interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a quick thank you to all for sticking with this thing through to what is (very roughly) the half way point.

Everything they had not dared to hope for comes to fruition.

The dissemination of misinformation is a resounding success, with Azriel reporting that even Hybern, over on his lonely island, has heard tales of Rhysand’s conquest over the General Slayer, the Wildfire of Autumn. They’re superfluous titles, but they carry the narrative weight to earn the stories places in songs, in fiction. It reaches the point where when they return to Velaris a week later, Cassian greets them with an out of key rendition of ‘Fires in The Night’, a song already spreading across Prythian all about the breaking of Autumn’s rogue son.

Having resolved to embrace his new role in the kingdom, Lucien claps along as Cassian serenades them, glancing over at his lord. Rhysand is doubled over against the stone table, unable to breathe from laughter. That sight alone makes it all worth it.

“To Autumn’s Wildfire,” Rhysand toasts that evening when they have all gathered for a celebratory dinner, even the final member of his court, whom Lucien has never before met. She is tiny, with eyes of smoke and silver, and prominent incisors. She does not eat with them, but drinks greedily from her goblet, which the servants hurry to refill with something that is not the wine being served to the rest of them.

“To Velaris,” Lucien says, raising his glass with the rest of them.

“To Velaris,” the party echoes, and with that, they drink.

It is the first wine Lucien has had in months, and he vastly underestimates how low his tolerance has fallen after all that time. Making the fatal mistake of draining his glass before dining, he’s only halfway through his rice when the room starts glowing. “Day wine,” he realises aloud, earning a cackle from Cassian, who is seated to beside him and claps him on his back. Rhysand and the new woman, Amren, have the heads of the tables, a position Lucien finds most fascinating.

“Bit of a lightweight, are we?” Cassian chuckles, his hand lingering on his shoulder before he pulls him over into a hug.

“Cass is on his sixth glass,” Azriel supplies as an excuse from opposite them, watching with a bemused smirk.

“So we started celebrating early.” Releasing the redhead, Cassian settles back in his seat and finishes yet another glass in less than a minute. “It’s not every day your high lord finds-”

“I think that’s enough for the General,” Rhysand interrupts, catching the servant's’ eyes.

Not that Lucien can blame him. He only ever had a glass of Day wine before, given to him by his mother when he came of age, but he remembers just how brilliant it was. Heralding from the Day Court itself, brewed from its palace’s own vineyards, the wine is no mere fae alcohol. Just sitting without moving, Lucien watches as his vision slides into neon technicolour, everything seeming to glow from within with a bright, warm light. It is mirrored by the sense of heat and comfort that blooms from his stomach out through his limbs, mixing with the dizzying effect of the alcohol to result in a sense of euphoric bliss. It’s no wonder Helion’s parties are so popular, although of course his father always refused to let them attend, citing that Helion was a ‘perverted heathen’ with whom associating would taint them for life. Apparently, Lucien just carries that gene naturally, although which one of his parents he inherited it from remains a total mystery. 

He is quick to request another glass.

He’s not quite sure what happens next. There’s a lot of cheering and quipping of back and forths between Rhysand and Cassian, and then if he recalls correctly, Morrigan clambers up onto the table and starts singing. All he knows is that sometime, round about dawn, they all end up on the rooftop, lying around in a circle, staring up at the fading stars.

Azriel and Mor have fallen asleep, each tucked into one of Cassian’s arms, and Amren is sat up watching the sun slinking above the horizon. It is Rhysand who turns to Lucien, their knees knocking together, bringing them nose to nose. “You okay?” He asks in a low voice, one hand stroking his jaw. “Sorry, I didn’t realise Cass had gone for breaking out our present from Helion. It’s pretty strong, isn’t it?”

There’s so much concern knitted between those eyebrows of his, even when Lucien rubs his fingers against the crease to try and smooth it. Sighing, he wriggles and and kisses him gentle on the forehead. “Rhys, I haven’t had this much fun since… I don’t know. I’m not sure I’ve ever had this much fun in my life. I’ve never had anything like this.” He glances over at the sleeping trio, at the stranger who sits vigil over the dawn. “It feels more like a family than mine ever did. Is that- is it okay for me to say that? I don’t want to-”

“Luce,” Rhys murmurs, catching his jaw and looking him right in the eye. “If you want us, we will always be here for you.”

Lucien blames the wine for the fact that he’s silently crying, tears streaming down his cheeks, though he laughs through it. “Cauldron, sorry, I don’t know why- I’m really drunk right now.”

“No shit.” Rhys grins, rubbing those tears away a thumb.

“I don’t think I’ve said this yet.” They look at each other, glowing in one another’s eyes as the last of the day wine sinks in. “But thank you, Rhysand. For everything. For helping me, and everyone else in this strange city. You’re actually… pretty great.”

Laughing, Rhys pecks him on the lips before pulling him into his chest, wrapping him in his arms safe and sound. Lucien didn’t realise how tired he is until that action alone drags him under, so he is too half-asleep to hear whatever it is that Rhysand mumbles quietly into his hair.


	15. prophète

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> chapter warnings: multiple instances of abuse

He sleeps to fire.

The start he remembers, viewed through the slats between the bars upon his cell window. Autumn’s dungeons are not quite subterranean, set within the earth, but the narrow windows crest above surface. Normally, this peculiarity is a mercy, but as wisps of smoke ebb in from outside, it provides a calling to witness something Lucien wishes he could forget.

As before, he employs the waste bucket, turned on its head, to help him level his eyes with the window. It’s set an inch or so off of the ground, so at first all he sees are dust clouds and feet. Legs rushing, sprinting, stumbling, driving up the dust of pathways to billow into through the windows, explaining what he’d taken to be smoke.

The prisons are set in the west quarter, a glorified slum populated by communities of lesser fae permitted to inhabit there for purposes of labour. It is not uncommon for there to be street brawls, or more often, raids set against them by the city guard. Lucien watches for the attire of soldiers, is quick to spot it. But with that, he sees the fire. He sees his father.

This is not as he remembers. Last time - that awful, awful time - his father did not stoop to the level of carrying out the orders himself. It was left to soldiers armed with torches and decrees. Yet this time, the flames that spread swift between the shacks of the quarter come not from staffs, but from his own father’s hands. To his left follows Eris, who grips onto his mother to pull her along.

Which isn’t right. She wasn’t there, this isn’t how the memory goes. She spends that awful night and shell-shocked dawn inside his cell, the one time he sees her before the beatings begin. The last time he sees her before Night places a claim atop his head.

Yet there she is, hauled along by his second eldest brother, obvious heir to the throne and truly, the only monster worthy of succeeding his father. Even he looks pale as they swarm on, though that might be a trick of the smoke that really _is_ smoke engulfing and saturating the air.

And now Lucien sees everything that is wrong with the vision. He should not see those sent to set the fire alight, save the stragglers flooding in from the west to rush and help out. Only a fourth of the quarter is to be burned this night, a warning, not a culling. Or so his father claims. But there they target the eastern neighbourhood, the one where _she_ resided in. Where her people took refuge during the human war, and have attempted to survive ever since.

Now though, as he watches on, the West is taken by the fires. Which… makes no sense. Targeting the East was understandable, as far as comprehending his father’s brutal logic goes. Artists and petty craftsmen dwelled there, those who got by on selling whatever wares they could scavenge or create from the little they had access to. It was by far the poorest district, even amongst the lesser fae slums, and generated no real revenue for the city. Why his father chose them to make of an example of, however cruel, did at least make sense.

This is illogical though. To burn the West can have no purpose other than a culling. Or to demonstrate that _no_ lesser fae are safe, that even those of value are well within a mere swipe of a hand to being murdered. Here lie the colonies of the Witchleins, who mine the forest quarries deemed too dangerous for anyone else, the Sidhe who provide nightly company to visitors of the city and nobility alike. Even the Jinn, who long gave up _speaking_ to their social superiors, are valued workers of metal and glass and jewels. As a collective, they provide half of the city’s income.

Yet there Lucien stands, watching members of all their races, and those others unfortunate to reside there, flee from their homes as Autumn’s innate power burns it all to cinders. Screams intermingle with sounds high fae shouldn’t be able to hear, have never heard before, yet somehow he can _feel_ them, experience them without understanding other than feeling the mourning in them, the unbearable pain of being burned alive by those left behind.

It is happening again.

 

***

 

“Cass,” Rhysand pants. “I need you to- I can’t.” He can’t keep holding down the redhead at the same time as preventing them all from being burned alive, not with those images bombarding his head.

“Got it,” Cass is quick to grunt, wincing as he battles through the monstrous hangover to ply both hands against Lucien’s chest to stop him thrashing about and doing himself an injury. Mor has a hold of his legs, swearing only louder every time she is kicked in the chest, whilst Azriel helps put out the eruptions of flame that keep catching in the immediate vicinity.

Amren just stands there, watching.

 _You didn’t tell me your whore was a Seer_ , she says to Rhysand without lips, her thoughts the same as always, cold and unstoppable as finely sharpened steel.

“He’s not,” he grunts back, furious that he can still hear her even over the din being projected into his head. It is a shame he could never kill her, especially when she smirks.

 

***

 

Seeing was too much, but feeling, feeling is worse than all of it magnified tenfold. It is hard to comprehend even as it unfolds, yet it is as if his mind, his chest, is flickering between bodies, lingering only as long as they are dying. It is just a dream, an incorrect memory, yet he experiences it all as if it is more real than his own reality. There’s few words, no flashing before the eyes of lives. Just ruptured limbs, haggard breathing, a sense of his own bones caving in. It feels like screaming without air or sound, and each time it begins to fade to a conclusion, the world flickers, and he is in another. A new body, a new death. Cycling over and over.

Even amongst the destruction, a familiar ghost returns to haunt him. That niggling, burying feeling that _he caused this_. At the same time as knowing that it is almost arrogant to suppose he is at fault for everything his father does, a childhood of being assured it is exactly that silences the doubt with deft precision. Had he not loved her, his father never would have released his hatred of the lesser fae. Had he not been born, his own mother would have been saved from all those beatings.

Then, queer and foreign, something warm touches him right in the centre of his forehead, a constant even as he is ripped between bodies. A kind of light, one that he cannot see, but feel. And though it does not belong in this dream, he’s come to know it well, a heat he’s laid next to and hopes to continue to do so for many night to come.

 _Luce, you know that wasn’t your fault. You know he just uses you as an excuse._ A voice he knows well doesn’t so much as say as commutes through that touch on his forehead. _They all do._

_I turned him on them though._

_Because he loved them so much before_ , Rhys says with plenty of sarcasm. Impossibly, that has Lucien laughing, even as he dies another death.

And for once his brain is kind and finds the truth in that. All those speeches and lectures his father gave on the draining of the Court by those useless, lazy lesser fae. All the crime they brought upon his city because it was all they were capable of. The ever tightening of rules and segregations to ‘protect’ the upper classes.

Only now does he start crying. Even though there Rhys is, alleviating the blame from him, it somehow hurts even more than taking it all on himself. But the warmth atop his forehead remains, and though no more words come, that is enough. It is enough just to know Rhysand sees him, and does not echo his father’s words.

The dying halts. Not that the fires do, or that there is no more death to come, but no longer is Lucien bound to the bodies that feel it. Instead he is standing next to his father, gripping his mother. He realises with a sickness that these are Eris’s eyes, Eris’s flesh and blood and a churning in his stomach, a rage buried deep in bones that he’s not sure who to unleash upon. He takes it out on his mother, grip tight, suffocating.

An ensign strides down the streets, halting before his father. Bows. “My lord. What message am I to give the others?”

“You are to have them tell that this isn’t the end of it. Until my son is returned to me, each week I’ll burn more.” Beron’s voice does not falter, his face unmoving as stone. The way Lucien has seen it so often before the public, only to dissemble into rage behind closed doors. “Ensure every court knows of this. I want them to know that it’s that bastard’s fault for all of this.”

“My Lord?”  
“High Lord Rhysand. He is to return my son to me, else I’ll burn the lot of them. There’s plenty beyond this city. And if I have to enlist other courts, so be it. I will not have my family humiliated this way.”

“Why’s that monster going to care?” Lucien finds his own lips drawling, Eris’s voice coming out of him. That rage in his stomach that is not his own delves deeper, fixates on Rhysand.

“Don’t get involved, Eris,” Beron says quietly, an edge in his tone that brings that fire right back up and back to chaos. “It’s too complex for you to understand.”

Biting back on his tongue, Eris, or Lucien, the blur between them confusing even him, the rage distills and he bends his mother’s arm to force her to cower. “Stop crying, would you?” He mutters, rolling his eyes. “It’s sickening.” Lucien has to watch his own mother look back at him with such a look of heartbreak that it was not even so acute when she hugged him goodbye before the beatings. This is something worse. Something raw. A kind of losing.

He tears himself away from Eris and his body when he strikes her, unable to watch. He’s back to dying, over and over, but it’s still better than that. And with that sense of how to pull, tug, manipulate the dreams, he tears himself out.

It is over.

 

***

 

Strong arms wrap around his neck, tugging him against a body he is most grateful to see again, feel again, especially as he breaks down into sobbing. He doesn’t feel sad, doesn’t feel anything aside from numb. Bleak emptiness in his stomach. Everything just floods through him and out onto Rhys’s shoulder, too much to feel all at once.

The others stand by watching. “It was just a dream,” Rhys murmurs, stroking his hair, over and over as he rocks him. “It was just a dream. It’s okay, you’re here with us now. It’s all over. You’re safe.” With a tremble in his voice, a cracking as he too releases what he was forced to experience, he mumbles, “It was just a dream.”


	16. amren

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> chapter warnings: canon-typical grey morality, blood and gore abound.

They both knew it wasn’t just a dream. The very next day, word came as a confirmation.

That is why Rhysand walks here.

Flanking Velaris on one side stands a forest, thick enough to obscure most light filtering down through the heavy spreads of the deodar cedar trees, which provide an enormous canopy to the half light. The constant nocturnal impression is enough to deter most fae who might wander through, let alone take up residence there, thus it is animals and sub-intelligent lesser fae that he sees as he passes.

Years ago, they would scuttle and prowl about with ease, the prey content to wander alone, the predators stalking without fear. Now, all pass in protective flocks and rushed movement. The birdsong Rhys learned well as a young child is now absent. Silence perforates the foliage like a disease.

It is hard not to feel guilty for their plight, knowing he is half the cause. Of course, this is an improvement. At least now she has consented to stay put in one habitat, has even accepted the tradition of dwelling within four walls. It is a relief, after the months of her terrorising the streets of Velaris itself; A relief she found animal blood preferable to that of the fae.

Sighting the white walls through the tree trunks, Rhysand slows his pace, raises his guard. She would not attack him knowingly - or so he hopes - but he is well aware of what happens to passing fae who make the mistake of thinking a tiny girl living alone is an easy target for some fun. That isn’t how he’d like to leave this world, thank you very much.

 _Foolish lordling,_ her voice seeps through his skull, making him shiver involuntarily as it always does. _I know your scent, though you stink of him. Is he recovered?_

_Cassian is with him. Azriel is standing guard._

_Poor wretch. I could not imagine a worse fellowship._

More than used to her crude dismissal of any and all, Rhys holds back on projecting some defence of his brethren. After all, he’s not here to argue. _Wise_ , she sneers. _Do not think our bargain so unbreakable._

 _I didn’t realise you missed the prison so dearly,_ Rhys shoots back, bristling at the unpermitted intrusion into his thoughts. _Shall I organise to send you back?_

He receives no worded response, but the door to the cottage slams shut with a bang, sending the rats gathered there scattering. Even this far away, the smell is nauseating. _Yet I must live amongst it. Must smell at all. Bound to this infernal flesh. Must smell_ myself _. Your world, with its meat and decay and putrefaction. How can you stand it for a second?_

Hand upon the door, he braces himself. Opening, he is quick to close his eyes as enormous rats, fat on her kills, pour out to join their fleeing kin. He does not hear her words inside her head, but feels something from her, a whining of starvation, a disgust. It is as if she timed it on purpose for his arrival; He knows how he shall find her.

The cottage, quaint and homely on the outside, is something born of nightmares within. Blood, dry and fresh, spatters the walls, floor, and ceiling, visible only amongst the corpses, which number in the hundreds. Nothing is safe as she tries everything, seeking something that does not repel her. Tigers, leopards, wendigos, birds, lost wanderers, all decorate her floors, stacked up against the walls where she cannot bring herself to touch them again once they are drained. Left for the rats to do away with, though their efforts are half-arsed, rendering faces gnarled and incomplete, limbs half chewed away.

Stepping over the corpses where he can, he ventures through corridors, lounge, and kitchen, only to find her out the back upon the porch. A wolf hangs from her maws, white fur seeped in scarlet.

She does not look up at him, not until he chucks the slaughtered lamb within his arms beside her. “Fresh from spring. Killed it myself.”

_Would that you had not killed it at all. It tastes less of your curse to rot when it is warm._

Despite her complaints, she tosses the dead wolf aside and seizes the lamb, a hand either side of its neck. _Sheer it next time. It takes too long to rid their wool from these useless teeth._

“My apologies.” He watches on as she tears in, suckling against the crimson that floods against her mouth. It is more refined than the first time he watched her, where all she knew to do was rip and claw at the spilt blood, spooning it into her mouth with cupped palms, lapping it up from the floor like a dog. Perhaps one day, she’ll make it almost watchable.

Not yet though. He still has to fight back the reflex to be sick.

 _Oh please_ , she sneers. _Do you not dine on their flesh? What difference does it make, that I might do it fresh from the bones? The typical hypocrisy of your race, of all your races. It is nearly as sickening as your bodies._ Unlatching her jaw, she casts the drained animal off to the lawn, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, which serves only to smear the red across her face.

 _Still so hungry_ , she thinks, not to him, but so loudly that he cannot shut it out. It is less words than a feeling, one he is forced to experience too, just as he was with Lucien, just as he is with all these thinking, feeling people. _Still gagging for this sick flesh. This ugly hunger. These bodies are so foul. So needing. I used never to need at all. It makes me sick._

“Amren,” Rhys interrupts quietly, using the name she chose for herself, taken from one of the great rulers of the continent, where she first fell. “I didn’t come here just to feed you.”

_Treat me like some pet, will you? I’ll rip your-_

“I need to know how to help Lucien. I’m not handing him over to Beron. But he’s threatening to go back unless we do something to stop him.”

Watching him, unblinking, she delves into his head, smirking when she finds his intentions. _Ah. Not so innocent, are we, lordling? And what shall the whore say, when he learns of this? Of how you use the unforgiveable? You think he will consent to aid you?_

“He won’t know. I’m not going to tell him. At least then, if Beron has us trialled for this, he won’t be an accessory to it. I’m not having him pay for his father’s cruelty. Not again.”

_Double-faced. A liar. All these things you are for what you deem the greater good. When will it get too much? When will people start questioning your truth?_

“I don’t care what he thinks about me. I’d rather he hate me and live, than die by Beron’s hand.”

 _So noble_ , she croons mockingly, rising to her feet. _Or so you like to think._

Swallowing, Rhysand tries not to let her get to him, though she is always so adept. It is hard to remember that they are on the same side when she is like this, still so entrenched in what _she_ has lost, what she had to sacrifice to help him. He cannot begrudge her the bitterness, but it does not make working with her easy.

“Will you help me, or not?”

A _nd why should I?_ This _is not the High Lord you entrapped me to avenge. Just because you could not find the courage to strike one, does not mean I shall aid you in another._

“Amren, I need your help with this, please. It’s the only way I can see to stop this without heralding an all out war.”

She looks at him with those unnerving eyes, long and hard, the way she does when she is reading him down to the bone. It is unsettling to say the least, bringing him to question if this really is the right choice. After all Lucien has trusted him with, it seems foul to not be open with him, and yet to do so could spell his death.

Why is nothing in this damned kingdom ever easy?

_I can help you. But I will need his blood._

“Lucien’s?”

_Yes. Blood magic requires the blood of the target himself, or failing that, an heir will do. He is not adopted?_

“No. I don’t think adoption is Beron’s style.”

_Then bring me his blood. A drop is enough. And I will bind it so that Beron can never kill again. Unless, you wish me to kill the man himself?_

“No. I couldn’t- wouldn’t do that without Luce’s knowing.”

 _Oh. So you_ do _have boundaries in your deceit. Could have fooled me._

“Is that all? Bring you his blood, and you can bind his father?” She laughs, swanning past him into the house of the dead and scooping up the corpse of a cat by the scruff of its neck. Opening the front door, she chucks it out, watching on as the rats come swarming back.

_It is a little more complex than that, but yes. Bring me his blood, and you shall have your whore undisputed again. Though I warn you, if the kingdom learns of your using blood magic, I shall not take the fall for you, and your Court shall be without a ruler. And I have no hesitations about making use of that fact. Our bargain will not continue past your death._

“Well then,” Rhys answers, looking on at the rats feasting at her feet. “We’d better make sure no one finds out.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **On semi-hiatus during November for Nanowrimo**


	17. du sang

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> chapter warnings: unedited b/c I'm writing this in public and having to do it on the sly. Will edit ASAP. Also, blood.

Sitting between Cassian’s legs, Lucien waits with perfect patience. When Rhysand returns, he is going to speak with him. He has his speech prepared.

“You’re awful quiet,” Cassian observes from where he is straddled behind him on the library sofa, enormous warrior hands proving defter than they look as he brushes and braids Lucien’s hair.

“Thinking.”

“Yeah?” Cass hums with a smirk, quick fingers tying off a plait. “I’d be careful with that. Terrible habit to get into.”

“One you’ve broken spectacularly,” Azriel says, his dry smile obvious in his voice though he is looking out the window he has positioned himself besides, keeping watch. Watching the skies, he said. Watching Velaris. Though Beron may not know of its existence, they’re taking all the precautions possible to prevent Lucien being captured, or so he claimed. They all know, really, that they’re just there to stop Lucien running back to daddy.

Which, strangely enough, makes him feel guilty. Not for wanting to run, but rather for his reluctance. Yes, he feels that tight, pounding obligation to surrender himself back to the hell of his old home to save all those endless lives, but it is not without chagrin. He is an idiot.

He has let himself get attached.

He should have anticipated that his father would never allow him to endure anything good, even if from the outside it might look like torture. His father would always find a way to punish him for his sins, no matter what ignorance they might try and keep him in. It was his one true talent.

Yet, brilliant though he may be, Lucien is not as eager as he should be to return. Half a year ago, he’d be yelling and thrashing about to get back and to save all those lives, to throw himself down as sacrifice. Now, logic has invaded his mind. Foul, insidious logic. It is chilling to find himself so calculating; When did he grow so old?

It is not his fault that he knows Rhysand will have a plan. It is not his fault that he knows however talented his father may be, Rhysand is twice as devious and equipped with an infinite capacity for compassion. And besides, Lucien himself, though once so eager to play the martyr and kiss death in greeting, knows that he has always been ‘the smart one’. It is no wonder his father wishes to see them separated.

Together, they could be a formidable team.

So he sits, and waits, and lets Cassian play with his hair. To his credit it is remarkably soothing, though he is certain the suggestion came from Rhysand. All those nights of rough sex, choked breath, scratched skin, each was meticulously followed by kind words, Rhysand’s hand in his hair, pulling a brush through the crimson. The conditioned sense of peace it creates comes back even now, even by Cassian’s hand. It’s kind of nice, really.

“You know we won’t let anything happen to you, or to the lesser fae, right?” Cassian murmurs, the backs of his fingers brushing against Lucien’s neck. He’s never felt hands so large, so strong, like they could snap a man in half between thumb and forefinger, yet they are so gentle on him now.

“I know.”

“And it would kill all of us to see you have to go back there.”

“I know.”

Resting in the quiet, Lucien thinks a while longer before inclining his face to the both of them. “I appreciate it, by the way. Everything you’ve all done for me since I’ve come here. And before that. For helping create a place like this.”

“It’s been a pleasure,” Cassian says with a grin that is mirrored more softly by his fellow Illyrian. “ _And_ it shall continue to be so. You’re one of us now, Red. No chance we’re letting you get off easy.”

“Who’s getting Lucien off?” A welcome voice drawls from the doorway. Lucien rolls his eyes at the arrival.

“Is this really the time for such crass humor?”

“My darling,” Rhysand purrs, crossing the room to take his hand and kiss the backs of his knuckles. “It is _always_ the time for such crass humor.”    

Laughter aside, they all look at him expectantly. Though he did not disclose to Lucien the precise location he was visiting, they all know he went _somewhere_ to do _something_. Given the matter at hand, they assumed he was off to find a solution. “If we might speak for a moment, alone?” His voice is delicate, charming as ever, but the disquiet in it is obvious enough to prevent even Cassian from arguing.

“Don’t let him tire you out _too_ much, Red,” he tells Lucien as he slides out from behind him, tucking his hair over one shoulder for him. “Remember you promised to come watch us train tomorrow.”

“Watching me hand your ass to you shall be rejuvenating, I’m sure,” Az drawls, drawing close to sketch a parting nod in the others’ direction, before dragging Cassian out onto the balcony with him. A mere flap of the wings, and they’re away.

Watching them with envy, Lucien waits until they’re out of sight before looking back at his lover. “How did things go?” He asks quietly. Rhysand, his cocky composure sobering, looks back with a gentle smile. He reaches out and touches Lucien’s jaw, fingers soft, eyes soft, lips all so soft so much so that Lucien cannot bear the thought of leaving him.

“As well as I could hope for. I have a way for you to stay here, and no one else will get hurt. Well. Maybe your father, a little bit. But no one has to die.”

“Do I want to know how you’ve achieved the impossible?” Lucien asks. There is something beneath those soft gazes that speaks of darkness, and not the kind they explore between the sheets of beds.

Rhysand meets his gaze and holds it, long and steady, contemplating. Lucien waits, as he promised himself he would. He knew right from the beginning that this would not be easy. There would always be a catch. “Do you trust me enough to believe me when I say it will work best if I do not tell you? But that I promise you I am doing this to keep you safe.”

“Only if you swear it isn’t putting you in danger at my expense.”

The hesitation in his expression is answer enough. However, as Lucien starts to scowl, Rhys drops down to sit beside him, leveling their gazes. “Lucien. I do not want you to leave.  I do not want you to be taken away back there, and not just because it would see you put through all that monstrousness again. It’s selfish too. I want you here so that _I_ can have you. So that I can be with you. So will you trust me to say what I am risking is worth it for what I stand to gain? Because you…” His hand is resting on his cheek, his eyes searching, debating. “You-” He averts his gaze to some spot upon the far wall. “You mean a lot to me.”

Lucien is grateful he did not say something more. At this moment, when they stand to lose so much, knowing what he might be losing would be too painful. So, instead of demanding more, he leans in and kisses Rhysand softly. “I trust you, Rhys. If not telling me makes whatever _it_ is easier, I don’t need to know the details. I want to stay here too, ever so selfishly. I am _happy_ here. I’m not sure I’ve ever been that before, so no, I’m not going to protest and insist you let me leave so I can suffer instead. Which probably makes me a terrible person, but-”

“No,” Rhys says, catching his jaw and silencing him with a thumb to the lips. “It just makes you a person.”

His insides feeling as if they might all be melting, dropping out through the floor, Lucien leans in to kiss him. “Will you accompany me to the bedroom, dearest?” Rhys asks, holding back. Though this is madness and they should be panicking, not fucking, Lucien finds himself biting back on a spark not born of fear.

“Why?” He drawls with delicious arrogance. “The other two just left. Morrigan is out at Rita’s, and Amren isn’t due for another week. I don’t see why you can’t do whatever you intend to do to me _right here_.”

Chuckling, Rhys shakes his head. “You’re filthy.”

“Says my corrupter.”

“Oh, your corrupter, am I? And who was it who came to me _begging_ for a dirty fuck?” He is all growls now, hungry eyes and hungrier smiles. Prowling forward across the sofa on all fours, he backs Lucien into the cushions and looks down at him with pure delight. “The Whore of The Night Court they’re calling you. How does that feel?”

Grabbing him by the collar, Lucien yanks him down. “Delicious.”

 

***

 

What feels like years of kissing later, they’re both shirtless and decorated in enough hickies to cause a scandal even amongst the Inner Circle. Breathless from the occupation of his mouth for far better purposes, Lucien looks up at the man above him and realises there is something coming. “Up to playing a little rough tonight?” Rhysand murmurs, his raised eyebrow enough to send quivers through the other.

“After last night? I’d kill you if we didn’t.” Fingers trailing down to slip beneath the other’s waistline and fondle his cock, Lucien arches up to rub against him. “Not sure you can live up to the standard I set, though.”

Snickering, Rhys removes his wayward hand and pins both his wrists above his hand, splaying him out like a sacrifice across the chair. “Oh, I have a few ideas that might just about be up to the challenge. You _were_ rather excellent though. I mean I’ve seen it played out in your head plenty of times but in the flesh,” he shivers in indulgence at the thought, “you really were spectacular.”

“No wonder you can’t let me go back to Autumn,” Lucien teases. “But if you’re claiming you could possibly compete-”

He doesn’t get to finish, rough lips and sharp teeth tugging at his mouth and dissolving all words to ragged giggling. It is all he can do to not devolve into helpless laughter as those teeth find his nipples, his abdomen, biting at his navel as they are so prone to doing. “I’d miss this too,” he teases between nips, long, heavy kisses. “My one and only soft boy.”

“Your soft boy who had you _whimpering_ , might I remind you,” Lucien quips back, though it is tricky to sound superior when your speech is marred by sinking groans.

“Oh, I’ll get you to do more than whimper tonight, I promise.”

Without unbuckling his trousers - much to Lucien’s disappointment - Rhys rakes his fingers up his chest. Back down, leaving raised white lines behind. Those nails of his, usually blunt from fighting, sharpen to fine points, tough as steel- Lucien knows this not from looking but from _feeling_ , feeling all too acutely as they devastate the skin of his chest. Across his abdomen, sharp scratches pool blood. The pain is sudden, electric, yet surprisingly tolerable.

“Oh please,” he drawls, looking back at the predator eyes upon him. “How _tame_.”

“Patience, my gorgeous slut. We’re only testing the waters here. Not feeling dizzy, are we? Little bit faint? Do you need a rest?” His voice is dripping with mocking, though now he’s experienced things from the other end, Lucien wonders if he really is checking. That one sign of care, of the tender affection these moments perverse, only serves to send him falling all the deeper. That word, the one Rhys was so careful not to say, resonates in his throat. But he doesn’t say it.

Not tonight.

“Rhysand, darling,” he says with airy disdain, propping his arms up upon the sofa like he’s some kind of king. “Do hurry up and fuck me, else I’m at serious risk of falling asleep before you get to anything worth sticking around for.”

“Oh?” Rhys hums. He draws something from his leathers, something small and silver. “Do you really think Autumn could give you this?”

An elegant, decorative blade comes to rest between them, tracing feather light the shadows upon Lucien’s chest. He watches it, the way the light plays across it. The way it catches those engravings, glints in the starlight. Watches, but does not see it, rather the sinfully devious things it could do to his body, in amongst hot kisses, grinding erections, Rhys and his filthy, filthy words.

“That little thing?” Lucien  looks down at Rhys’s crotch. “I suppose it does put me in mind of _something_. Though maybe the knife’s a little bigger.” Gasping in exaggerated offense, Rhys drags him down the couch towards him and that knife.

“You are _awful_.” The wicked grin grows wickeder still. “I love it.”

Lucien nearly thought he said something else there. Thank the Cauldron he didn’t. “Come here,” Rhys purrs, slinking down his torso to trail figures of eight across his sternum. “I want to ask you something. You know my tattoos?”

“I’ve seen them once or twice I suppose,” Lucien mumbles, watching that sharp edge scan his skin in wanton curiosity.

“We get them, as Illyrians, as markers of pacts and bargains. I have ones for both Cassian and Azriel. One for Morrigan too. One for Amren.” The knifepoint dips to circle his nipple. “I was thinking I might do something a little different for you. With your permission.”

“You want to mark me up, huh?” Lucien drawls, though his breathing has become awfully shallow. “This you staking your claim?”

“Our claim,” Rhys corrects him. “You’ll mark me too.” He smirks. “A matching set.”

“How romantic.”

Watching him, Lucien hesitates for just a second. He dusts his fingertips over the dark ink swirling across Rhys’s broad shoulders, down his arms and chest. “You trying to cheat me out of a badass tattoo here?”

“Oh, I’m sure we can arrange for you to get some too, if you like.”

“Hmm. I might take you up on that,” he says, shimmying up the sofa to prop his back against the arm. “But I think I like the idea of getting something a bit special. Though good luck dealing with a jealous Cassian.”

“Oh, he’ll be green with it. But I’ll deal with him later. For now…” Rhys muses, knife kissing the tip of Lucien’s navel. “I intend to devote _all_ my attention to you.”

Falling to quiet, he drips kisses down the other’s chest to lavish his stomach, before bringing the knife down to join his attentive lips. It starts gentle, lilting up his side as he muses where to put it. “Roll over,” he instructs, to which his victim silently complies. The cold touch of metal strokes spine and wrist alike, before settling at the small of his back. It draws a circle once, twice, thrice, giving Lucien the chance to protest if it really is too humiliating. He makes not a sound. The idea of Rhys finally claiming him in a permanent, lasting way like this- it has him rock hard against the give of the sofa, biting down on his tongue to stop himself groaning. Suddenly, the promise of the knife’s kiss seems all the sweeter.

“How am I supposed to copy it on you if-” His own hiss cuts him off as the blade digs and penetrates, slicing into his skin cold and unrelenting. To scar, he goes deep, so much so that Lucien could swear he feels it in his bones. Being marked for life by the man he- well. It’s best not to even think it with a daemeti about.

The blade lightens, by Rhys doesn’t turn him. He grabs something, a cloth of some kind, and wipes away the excess blood. “Such a gentleman,” Lucien murmurs as the other folds the cloth and sets it aside with care. Lucien glances at it, lingers as a thought passes, but shoves it back. He thinks he might understand why he isn’t supposed to know certain things.

“Now you do me,” Rhys says, pulling him back around and sitting him up. “Mountains, with two stars above them.”

“Three,” Lucien corrects him, with no knowledge as to why the word suddenly comes out his mouth. Rhys blinks back at him. “Just a feeling.”

“Three it is,” Rhys says, handing the knife over.

With trembling hands, for he is a stranger to knives and certain he will mess up, Lucien turns the blade on the other. At the base of his spine he carves in blood the lines of a mountain range, then three pointed stars above them. “Why mountains and stars?”

“I love that you ask that only _after_ I’ve scarred you for life.”

“I said I trusted you, didn’t I?”

“Fair,” Rhys concedes, biting down on a cushion as Lucien marks out the final star. “To represent that we both will bow before no one, save Night itself.” He chuckles. “Or each other.”

Wiping away the blood with the sleeve of his discarded shirt, Lucien smiles softly. “I knew I was right to trust you.” Bending, he kisses the raw wound of his back. “And I think _now_ , you may take me to the bedroom.”


	18. bleu, saignant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Note: The next chapter shall be dedicated to Carly (they'll know what I mean by the end of this chapter).

“Good luck,” Lucien wishes his lord with a kiss to the forehead. He offers a weak smile to the brooding female next to Rhys, but Amren doesn’t even glance his way. She’s too busy looking affronted by the two sweaty illyrians behind him. “You’re certain you don’t want me to come with you?”

“In this case, no. Next time we visit your father though, I’m _more_ than happy to give him the same treatment we gave Keir.”

Behind them, Cassian breaks into yet another rendition of their new ‘theme song’, which is driving them all up the wall by now. It was pretty much all he sang the night they drank, and it’s getting old swiftly. “Give him hell from me,” Azriel interjects in his usual low, musical tone, though there’s enough of a threat in it to give Lucien chills.

“And me,” Cass joins in.

“Try not to kill him,” is all Lucien says, trying not to laugh at the others, his poorly disguised amusement mirrored back at him by his lover.

“Stay safe,” Rhys says with a kiss. He takes a hold of Amren’s shoulder, and they vanish. Lucien doesn’t realise he’s frozen staring till Cassian interrupts.

“All ours now, Red,” he jeers with a grin in his voice. “However will we keep you entertained?”

If there is one thing Lucien has learned he can rely on even more so than Rhysand’s talented tongue, it’s Cassian’s unfailing ability for dispersing tension. Swivelling around to face them, the shirtless warriors scrapping with one another for his amusement, he gives them a look truly worthy of The Whore of The Night Court. “Oh? I’m sure we’ll manage to find _something_.”

 

***

 

It is a good thing the High Lord of Night is not a jealous man, for he returns to find Lucien in a somewhat… _compromising_ position. And considering the kinds of positions he has put himself in on a public platform, that is saying something.

Lucien is down on his knees before a Cassian clad solely in his underwear, one hand resting on his thigh when he hears the rush of air indicating someone’s winnowed behind him. He assumes it cannot _possibly_ be Rhysand, given how he’s only been gone an hour. However, despite this sound logic, someone clears his throat behind him.

“I leave you alone for _one minute_ ,” a certain High Lord drawls. “And I’m already forgotten?”

Ignoring him in favour of continuing to clean out the gash on Cassian’s thigh, Lucien just shrugs. “You didn’t see them fighting. It was highly irresistible. I’m thinking perhaps I chose the wrong winged bastard to seduce?’”

“Your taste is better than I thought, Red,” Cassian praises with a grin, though it vanishes with a glance at his lord.

Mid-dab of the wound, Lucien finds himself dragged up off of his knees and swung round to get thrown over a shoulder. “Hey!” He protests, though he does so cackling. “You put me down this instant.”

“This is an abduction. There shall be no putting down. Cassian. Azriel.” Rhys gives him compatriots a nod. “I’ll debrief you later. For now, I’ve got a harlot to win back.”

“I’m assuming from your good mood that everything is settled?” Azriel guesses, also shirtless and in his under garments. As if just to make Lucien jealous, he crosses to drape himself over Cassian, giving the redhead a pointed smirk at his noticing.

“This particular darling shall be staying with us for the foreseeable future,” Rhysand confirms a little haughtily. “ _If_ he can stop seducing my best friends every time I so much as blink.”

“Oh no, he does it perfectly well without you blinking,” Cassian ventures bravely, cackling at the look it earns him. He devolves into total hysterics when Lucien blows him a kiss.

A snap of shadows, and he’s winnowed off to the bedroom. Sniggering as he is chucked down atop the sheets, Lucien scuttles away from his assailant to a safe distance before turning. Rhys, as put together as he was when he left, showing no signs of a struggle back in Autumn, crawls after him.

“Oi. No reclaiming until you’ve explained what happens,” Lucien warns, sticking a leg out to keep the hunting cat at bay. Too bad Rhys merely smirks and catches that foot, kisses his ankle, pushes back the silk robe to expose calf and thigh. Lucien flicks his nose. “Bad High Lord. Sit. _Stay_.”

“Woof woof,” Rhys drawls with a roll his his eyes, though he obeys. Sitting back on his hind quarters, he sighs.

“I don’t even know where to start.”

“I believe the beginning is traditional.”

“Because we’re just so very traditional,” Rhys says, earning himself a jab in the ribs from his bedfellow. “Alright alright. Stop harassing me and I’ll tell you already.”

“May I remind you that I was the one abducted?”

“It had to be done. Seeing you on your knees put ideas in my head. I could make _much_ better use of such a thing than you merely playing nursemaid.”

Exhaling, he leans back against the bedpost and mulls over his words before speaking. “I’ll confess, things did _not_ go as planned-”

“What?” Lucien interjects, paling. “Do I-”

“No, no. Don’t worry, you don’t have to go back, no one is dying. It just- it didn’t go as expected. I thought we had certain measures put in place but for whatever reason, they proved ineffective.”

Thinking back to the blood, the cloth, the rumours he has heard about the Night Court, about _Amren_ , Lucien chews his lip. “I could have told you that,” he says softly. “I don’t know for certain but I’m fairly certain there’s a reason I’m not my father’s favourite.”

“You knew?” Rhys asks, looking up at him in alarm.

“I guessed,” Lucien says. “You’re not as subtle as you think, you know. Though I _do_ like my new decoration.”

Head in his hands, Rhys takes a couple of breaths at that news. “Then I’m glad it didn’t work. If they’d found out and we’d been trialled- if you’d-”

“But it didn’t work,” Lucien says, deducing what he can from Rhys’s fractured sentences. “So how did you solve all our problems?”

“ _I_ didn’t,” Rhys admits, slumping back to look at him, expression frazzled. “I only took Amren along to make sure there wasn’t anything else to do with the magic, but once we knew it wouldn’t work and he started making threats- I never knew she gave a damn about us. I thought she _hated_ you.”

“Did she and Beron bond over the mutual loathing?” Lucien asks, not exactly surprised to hear he isn’t the woman’s favourite.

“No. Quite the opposite.” Rhys sounds as shocked as Lucien feels at the following news. “She went- I’ve never seen her like that. I mean I’ve seen her murder a lot of people, and tear out even more throats, but this was different. She was in control this time, and it was twice as terrifying for it. I’ve never heard so many threats from so tiny a woman. And with her - you know how it is. You don’t doubt that she could break the world with a snap of her fingers. She had your father on the verge of soiling himself, I’d say.”

“So what, she threatened him into relenting?”

“You didn’t hear those threats, Luce. The things she will do to your father if he dares harm lesser fae or you again- no living thing should ever endure that, even him, Cauldron, not even Hybern. If she goes for him, I wouldn’t recommend watching.”

“She mustn’t,” Lucien says, quick, unthinking. “If Eris gets the throne, I don’t-”

“Don’t worry. There’s no chance he’s going to provoke her. After he watched her- why _do_ you keep so many dogs around your palace?”

“Hunting,” Lucien answers. “What did she-?”

“Let’s just say there is one less dog wagging its tail to your father’s whims nowadays. A dog that died serving the noble cause of scaring the _shit_ out of your father.”

He shouldn’t, he really, really shouldn’t, but Lucien starts laughing. Once he starts, he can’t stop. The idea of Amren doing Cauldron knows what to some poor, poor pup in front of his father, of _his father_ being scared, it’s too much to picture and not break out snorting. “Oh Mother above, remind me to thank her someday. Preferably on one of the days when she doesn’t want to glower at me.”

“Might be a few centuries. She’s still learning how to control the smiling facial muscles.”

Still shaking from laughter, Lucien looks up at Rhys, that curious man more shadow and darkness than any he’s ever met, yet brighter than any sun. “You are brilliant,” he tells him, leaning in to kiss him, stroking a hand fond through his hair.

“I know.” Kissing him back, Rhys pulls him close and wraps his arms around his waist. “Does this mean I’m back in the running?”

“Mmm, I don’t know, I haven’t seen you sparring without your shirt on yet,” Lucien informs him with absolute seriousness. “That might help turn the tide in your favour.”

Looking back at him, Rhys ponders something (something definitely devious, judging by the slow, greedy smirk that spreads across his lips) for a while before taking his hand in his, bringing their fingers to his lips to kiss. “I have a feeling that the celebration of triumph that I’m about to propose,” he says, “will most definitely win me your favour.”

Trying to anticipate what he’s thinking, Lucien takes a leap of faith. “Do tell,” he prompts, a most unwise decision given how he is being regarded like a rare delicacy. Rhysand’s smirk grows fat on victory.

“It involves a one Commander Cassian, and a certain brooding shadowsinger…”   


	19. rôti: première partie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> split into two parts b/c twice as many bodies = twice the length

No matter how well he might school his expression into calm, Lucien can’t stop playing with his hair. “Nervous?” Rhys hums, coy, playing oh so innocent, which is entirely unfair when underwater he is fondling the other’s cock.

“What do you think?”

“I think you would have me believe you’d done this dozens of time,” Rhys replies, smooth and easy. “Don’t tell me all those insinuations of your love affair with Cassian were really just fantastical lies?”

Not deeming such mockery worthy of a verbal reply, Lucien merely flicks water at him. It does not help that the bathhouse is boiling. Rhys only told him that they were going out to meet the others in Velaris, not where, and thus he’d gotten all dressed and dolled up, aiming to impress. Now, his hair is soaked around his shoulder, curling under the effects of the heat, and the kohl around his eyes is probably dripping down his cheeks. He feels like a moron.

“Shh,” Rhys hushes him, though he hasn’t spoken.

“Hurry up and teach me to block you out of my head,” Lucien grumbles, crabby with nerves and embarrassment.

“Well the first step is not to wear your thoughts on your face, darling,” Rhys purrs, low and creeping closer. Leaving his seat in the steaming bath behind, the lord swans over to slip between his legs, straddling him. Vapour rises up to the ceiling, leaving them both sticky and sweating even without touching each other. With that hot, dark skin pressed against his, Lucien thinks he might die from overheating. He can’t breathe for it.

At least they have the baths to themselves. Though the system could no doubt room a hundred or so people, High Lord Rhysand pulled a couple strings, and for tonight, the place is deserted. “You look stunning, as always,” Rhys assures him softly, chuckling at his pout and scowl and how he is getting worked up over something so simple when hours ago they both faced death. His face speaks of understanding though; He knows what it is to need distraction. They have found it in one another’s skin often enough to know theirs is a shared connection.

“But you should know, even if you looked a mess, we’d still be here for you. Or perhaps I shouldn’t speak for the others.” Tucking his sodden hair behind an ear, Rhys looks down at him, their naked bodies pressing close. “You could turn into the weaver’s twin and I’d still be nauseatingly fond of you.”

“You have the strangest kinks,” Lucien tells him, failing to repress a smile when his wit earns a laugh.

“True. Good thing they’re all for you.”

Lucien wants desperately to distract from his boiling skin and racing thoughts with chit chat and flirting, but the option is plucked from the table by close lips, searching kisses. Hands wander down his chest, rubbing across his pectorals, thumbs to his nipples, though they’re numb with heat. Palms come to cup his stomach, the swells and falls of it, a chuckle rising in the other’s throat as he shivers, sensitive to the touch.

Somewhere along the way he forgets that he agreed to what is to follow, though he feels he cannot be blamed; After all, who else could remember anything at all when those long, clever fingers are touching them inside and out, hot lips on his all the while. He can only thank the Cauldron for the privacy, because he is whining like a kitten at how slow and loving Rhys’ touches are. Tender. Teasing. Refusing to give him more.

Two more bodies coaxing him ought to do the trick.

“Follow me,” Rhys murmurs, fingertips trailing up the length of his cock before he pushes off of him, into the depths of the water. It is shallow enough to stand, even at the centre, but he floats half on his back to watch Lucien follow. Tracing figures of eight with his hands, he sculls back, snorting at Lucien’s needy, shell-shocked expression. “Don’t tell me you’re spent already?”

“Don’t tell me you’re using the other two to slack off,” Lucien fires back. “If I don’t get your cock tonight, I can and will throttle you.”

“Oh, I imagine I’ll make you beg for it more than once. Especially since you’ve so much stamina for it nowadays.” Rhys is all grins and intrusive thoughts, projecting images of a whimpering Lucien into his mind. “And so very desperate.”

Giving chase, Lucien swims after him out through the curtained exit, out into the outdoor pool. Though he is really, really very in need of a good hard fuck after the uncertainty of the past few days, even he stops watching Rhysand for a moment. His chosen location for the meet up deserves it.

Above them, the night is crystal clear, not a cloud in sight, leaving the stars unnaturally bright and large. The moon is double the size of any he has seen in Autumn, bright enough to illuminate Rhys perfectly. Its silver caress captures the water too, catching in the rising steam to create a veil of misted mirrors. Where the water ripples in the gentle breeze, it turns the crests of the peaks into slivers of crystal diamonds, twinkling under the majesty of the night. Beyond the pool, a cliff edge drops into mere nothingness, only the sea beyond them.

Beneath the stars, they are totally alone. Totally alone, except for two strangers who are far from unexpected.

“And here we were thinking his lordship was keeping you all to himself,” Azriel says with his usual quiet affectation. He is already submerged, perched at the cliff’s edge, a wine glass clasped in his hand. His counter part, buckass naked and honestly impressive for it, stands at the poolside pouring refreshment for him. It serves to reenforce the dynamic Lucien was already certain they have.

Chased into silence by shyness, Lucien sticks close to his lord as he glides through the water over to them. He hangs back, watching on in poorly concealed awe as his lordship steps up to Azriel and leans in to kiss him lovingly on the lips. He does not need to hear the stories to know they have all three done this before, many, many times. Perhaps he should be jealous. Perhaps he should feel cheated he has never before been told.

He does not. All he feels is a hardening beneath the water, and a strange, perverse urge to _watch_.

“Oh no,” Rhys tells him, catching his line of thinking. “Not this time, soft boy. We’re all here for you.”

“You know _we_ can’t hear your magic daemati conversation, right?” A well-trained servant Cassian informs him, earning a scowl from his lord, who was attempting to play the serene seductor, and a laugh from the redhead.

“Are you getting in the water or not, General?” Rhys quips back, leaning over the poolside to offer out a hand.

Taking a swig straight from the bottle - much to the repulsion of his lover, judging by the resentful twisting of his nose - Cassian sets it down and takes the offered guidance. Too bad for him Rhys does not regally guide him in, but rather tugs, yanking him down onto him so he cracks the water’s surface with an almighty splash.

Watching on with Azriel, Lucien is sure he must be furious, or flustered at least. But perhaps he does not know Cassian as well as he likes to think. The warrior emerges from the water roaring with laughter and tackling Rhysand back, and all of a sudden it is not a fucking but a brawl, a combat of arms and limbs and filthy insults in illyrian that one cannot comprehend. It might be brotherly, were it not for how it ends in Cassian getting pinned against the side and kissed most thoroughly, all whilst being told he is a brilliant, fantastic asshole.

Lucien realises he is not the only one that Rhysand might love, though theirs is of a different nature. Perhaps he is envious, witnessing how well they know the ticking of one another’s internal clocks, how they can hurt and heal and laugh about both without speech required. He does not want to brawl with these men though. Not any more. He wants something far less accepted in the camps of the Illyrian warriors, yet all the more worshipped in the sheets of the inner circle.

He is captivated, but that does not stop him from noticing Azriel. Those dark eyes, ones that command shadow and men alike, watch on with an intensity that goes beyond Lucien’s novel curiosity. It is funny that he thought that he himself would be exposed by this, when instead he is learning so much about the others. It is a relief, but an intimate one. He’s not only tied to Rhysand now; They’re letting him in too, and as he lingers in the boiling water, he finds how thankful he is. He has never been so deeply trusted, by anyone, let alone so many.

Not even _she_ let him see her like this.

“You don’t think we’re letting you get away with just watching, do you?” The words should belong to Rhys, so often in his head without meaning to be, but Lucien is surprised to find it is Azriel speaking them. He’d fire back some smart comment about how he too was looking on, but a hand is outstretched towards him, scars across the palm, shadows entwining the fingers. Azriel is just the kind of monster rumours spoke of when they gossiped about the Night Court.

And those whisperers will never know what he’s really like. They’ll never know what it’s like as Lucien takes his hand, finds himself dragged in close and laid to waste by the shadowsinger’s kisses.

When Rhysand first proposed this ‘celebration’, he was uncertain of if it would actually work. He’d been certain he’d only languish in Rhys’s attention, yearn for his lips, his touch, his destruction. He hopes the lord does not take offence as all insecurity is wiped clean from his consciousness by hands that are _sin incarnate_ . Cauldron. Fucking Cauldron _fuck_. He knew the shadowsinger could torture a man’s darkest secrets from the depths of his soul by the faintest of touches, but this is ridiculous.

He hopes the staff won’t mind too much if he comes in the waters.

They get too into it, spilling the wine glass set aside across the cliff edge so it topples and falls down out of sight, out to the ocean below. Though Lucien tries to apologise, Azriel is having none of it. He is reigning depravity upon his neck, his hands all the while roaming fingers inside of him, probing deeper and deeper until he feels like he is being fucked by fingers alone, begging incoherently for more, syllables and words lost to the past. Shadows kiss his jaw, his cheeks, pinpoints of icy cold as the water and the heat of that touch evaporate him body and soul.

How Cassian survives this on a regular basis he does not know. And now he is thinking of Cassian, enormous and muscle bound as he is, a dishevelled, whimpering mess below the devil of shadows and intrusive fingers. He is imagining them fucking against the table just like how he first saw them, covered in sweat like they were from training that morning, muscles invigorated from the rush of adrenaline and blood, nailing each other hard enough to destroy furniture and dignity alike.

Admittedly, he was kidding about the coming thing- not anymore, apparently. Biting down with a vice grip on Az’s shoulder, he doesn’t mean to as he orgasms against him, blindsided by the sudden ravishing. He can’t- he can’t think. All he can do is feel. His entire body is shaking. He’s a hot, delirious mess. And what he really, really wants, is _more_.

“I should have warned you,” Cassian’s smug voice teases through the dizzy haze of the afterglow. “ _I’m_ actually the tame one. This guy’s a fucking animal.”

“I did try to warn you, Luce,” Rhys adds, arms draped around Cass’s shoulders. “These two require _a lot_ of stamina to tire out. Even I struggle to keep up with them.”

Lucien knows he is quite utterly doomed.

But that does not stop him from diving back down for more.


End file.
